Home/Fronts: Contemporary War in British Literature, Drama, and Film 9783839451878

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Janina Wierzoch Home/Fronts

Culture & Theory  | Volume 226

PS 115:1

Janina Wierzoch has been working as a research assistant at Universität Hamburg and as a lecturer at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. She holds a degree in British literature and culture, media studies, and German literature. Her research and teaching interests include British prose fiction from the 19th century onwards as well as contemporary drama; a special focus lies on film and television, also extending to other visual and new media.

Janina Wierzoch

Home/Fronts Contemporary War in British Literature, Drama, and Film

Acknowledgements: My thanks go to Prof. Dr. Ute Berns, Prof. Dr. Monika Pietrzak-Franger, and Prof. Dr. Stephan Karschay, to staff and fellow doctoral students at the Institute of English and American Studies of Universität Hamburg, and to all who listened and commented—especially Verena Keidel, Dr. Rebekka Rohleder, and Mareike Gamarra Zevallos. I also want to thank Anike Bader for providing the cover illustration and Anne and Waldemar Wierzoch, Elise and Henri Bader for their invaluable support during this project.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2020 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Anike Bader, Hamburg Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5187-4 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5187-8 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839451878

Contents

1.

Introduction ........................................................................ 9

2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3.

Contexts and State of Research .................................................... 19 War ............................................................................................................. 22 Home.......................................................................................................... 30 Home/Front ................................................................................................. 38

3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3.

Theoretical Framework ............................................................. 41 Yuri Lotman’s Semiosphere .............................................................................. 42 Cultural Notions of Trauma ..............................................................................48 Michel Foucault’s Heterotopia ........................................................................... 51

4. Novel .............................................................................. 53 4.1. Exploration: New Home/Fronts in British Prose Fiction.......................................... 53 State of Research .................................................................................55 4.1.1. Urban Protest: The Run-Up to War............................................................ 57 The City at War in Ian McEwan’s Saturday ................................................. 58 4.1.2. Rural Frontlines: The Country at War.........................................................64 Invading the Pastoral in Pat Barker’s Double Vision ......................................65 4.1.3. In the War Zone: Soldiers and War Correspondents ...................................... 70 Young and Female Perspectives in David Massey’s Torn ................................ 73 4.1.4. Histories of War: Memory and the Past...................................................... 74 Old and New Conflicts in Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations ......................... 75 4.1.5. Private Wars: Embattled Families............................................................. 79 Home Unguarded in Ali Smith’s The Accidental ............................................ 79 4.2. Close-Up: Home/Fronts in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here ................................ 85 Origins: The Family Home .......................................................................89 Rites of Belonging: The Communal Home ................................................... 92 Alternative Homes: Holiday Spaces........................................................... 94 A Place of Refuge: Belonging and the Military .............................................98 The Journey: Rethinking Home ................................................................ 99

The Revenant Brother: Confronting War................................................... 103 Returning Home: New Perspectives .........................................................105 The Home/Front in Wish You Were Here..................................................... 107 4.3. Findings: Narrating the Home/Front ................................................................... 111 5. Stage Plays ........................................................................ 115 5.1. Exploration: New Home/Fronts on the British Stage.............................................. 115 State of Research ................................................................................ 118 5.1.1. Homecoming Soldiers: The Return of War ................................................. 122 War Games in Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity ................ 122 Departure and Return in Roy Williams’s Days of Significance .........................126 5.1.2. Border Spaces: Between War and Home .................................................. 132 Blurring the Boundary in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Belongings ........................ 134 Inclusion and Exclusion in Cat Jones’s Glory Dazed .................................... 135 5.1.3. Fact-Based Drama: The Reality of War .................................................... 136 Performing War in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch ......................................... 137 Theatre as Therapy in Owen Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F................... 144 5.1.4. Civilian Perspectives: Private Lives at War................................................ 151 Special Relationships in David Hare’s The Vertical Hour ................................ 151 Home Politics in Sarah Helm’s Loyalty ...................................................... 152 The Broken Promise of Home in Mike Bartlett’s Artefacts ............................. 154 5.2. Close-Up: Home/Fronts in Simon Stephens’s Motortown.........................................156 Space and Movement: Structures of Return............................................... 157 The Point of Departure: The Unhomely Home.............................................158 Ghosts of Home and War: Traumatic Patterns............................................159 A Day’s Journey: From Home to Home/Front .............................................. 161 Access and Excess: Performing War at Home ........................................... 163 Homecoming: A Sense of Defamiliarisation ...............................................165 The Family: Community as Complicity ...................................................... 167 The Home/Front in Motortown.................................................................168 5.3. Findings: Performing the Home/Front................................................................169 6. Film and Television ................................................................175 6.1. Exploration: New Home/Fronts on British Screens................................................ 175 State of Research ............................................................................... 180 6.1.1. War Films: At the Frontline .................................................................... 181 Exploring Battlefields in The Patrol and Kajaki: The True Story ..................... 183 6.1.2. Docudrama: Records of War...................................................................186 Public Affairs and Private Matters in 10 Days to War ....................................186 Running against Blair in Reg ..................................................................189 Alternative Hypotheses in WMD and The Trial of Tony Blair ............................189

6.1.3. Domestic Film Drama: At the Home Front ................................................. 191 Hidden Truths in Verity’s Summer ............................................................ 192 6.1.4. Soldier Films: Traumatic Returns ............................................................ 194 Justice and Trauma in The Mark of Cain ...................................................195 Female Fighters in Our Girl and In Our Name ............................................. 200 6.1.5. Genre Films: War Action, War Crime........................................................ 202 Home Invasions in Route Irish................................................................ 203 Serialising War in Silent Witness ............................................................ 204 6.2. Close-Up: Home/Fronts in Peter Bowker’s Occupation .......................................... 208 Starting Points: Critique and Title .......................................................... 209 Exposition: Invading the War Zone........................................................... 211 Homecoming: Embattled Returns ............................................................ 212 Spoils of War: Deceptive Fantasies.......................................................... 217 Ends of War: Conflating the Spheres ........................................................ 221 Home/Fronts in Occupation ................................................................... 222 6.3. Findings: Screening the Home/Front ................................................................ 224 7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media ....................... 229 7.1. Media Perspectives on Home and Contemporary War............................................ 231 7.2. Transmedia Perspectives on British Home/Fronts ............................................... 233 Opposition: The Spheres of Home and War............................................... 233 The Breakdown of the Boundary: Home as Home/Front............................... 237 Autocommunication: Holding Up the Mirror .............................................. 243 Home/Fronts: Addressing the Current State of Britain ................................ 245 Works Cited ............................................................................ 247 Prose Fiction ..................................................................................... 247 Stage Plays ....................................................................................... 247 Films and Audiovisual Material .............................................................. 248 Sources ............................................................................................ 250

1. Introduction

On 27 May 1997, just weeks after he assumed office, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair stated at a NATO meeting: Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value. (“Statement”) The statement, spoken in the context of improved post-Cold War NATO-Russian relations, was rendered particularly ironic when, just a few years later, Britain was on the brink of more than a decade of war on two fronts: in Afghanistan (2001-20141 ) and in Iraq (2003-2011). Even at the time, Blair’s claim of a new, peaceful “European landscape” (“Statement”) revealed a “misplaced Kantian confidence in the future,” Christopher Coker writes (vii; also, Mom 57). The “smug western European belief that they had ‘conquered war’” ignored, if nothing else, the conflict-ridden Balkans (Ball 541). In Anna Geis, Lothar Brock, and Harald Müller’s Democratic Wars, Christopher Daase observes that “democracies are not inherently peaceful” (74). Theories of democratic peace, Daase argues, must take into account democratic belligerence born out of “non-recognition, exclusion and enmity” towards nondemocratic states (75). The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, then, are symptomatic of a Western “culture of fear,” as outlined by Coker in War in an Age of Risk (viii), not its contradiction. And yet, for a culture that pathologises risk-taking (Coker ix), that separates “war making and its civilian support” (Imber and Fraser 384), and believes that, in the present context, war is “‘brought home’ to a nation that is not itself at war” (Walklate, Mythen, and McGarry 152) war signifies a disruption, a destabilisation which calls for a response and an effort to come to terms with the realities of war. War as a threat to British life became an issue when casualty numbers rose noticeably after 2005.2 The reality of dead British soldiers returning to a “casualty-

1 2

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) withdrew in 2014; since 2015, NATO forces act in training and advisory capacities (Resolute Support Mission) (NATO). After a peak of 61 operational deaths in 2003, numbers again increased in 2006 to highs in 2009 (109) and 2010 (103) (Ministry of Defence, “UK”).

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averse” (Chin 14) homeland was addressed in what came to be known as “the Wootton Bassett phenomenon” (Freeden 1). ‘Bodies of evidence’ appeared in the Wiltshire market town of Wootton Bassett after repatriation flights from the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq had been redirected to the nearby military airbase RAF Lyneham in the early months of 2007 (Jenkings et al. 358). On 13 April, the first of 167 convoys carrying the bodies of British servicemen killed abroad passed through Wootton Bassett (K. Davies 247). Just a few residents, led by veteran members of the Royal British Legion, gathered to honour the dead on this occasion (Freeden 3). They responded, “on behalf of the nation,” as Nick Hewitt argues, “to a situation unprecedented in British history: the trickle home of the dead from an ongoing, morally questionable war of uncertain outcome” (3). In the following months and years, the spontaneous tribute, repeated whenever the cortèges passed, evolved into a ritualised “spectacle of solemn public grief” (Jenkings et al. 360). At times, more than a thousand people attended the events—civilians and military, relatives and officials, tourists and locals (K. Davies 247). After July 2009, nation-wide news reports boosted the public perception of this “grassroots” initiative (Freeden 3) and “cement[ed] the status of the events as semi-official displays facilitated by the necessary civic and policing authorities, local businesses and social groups” (Jenkings et al. 358). Official recognition followed in 2011: Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the town would receive the title Royal to acknowledge its commitment to honour the war dead (Jenkings et al. 362). “[T]o propose alternative relations,” Katie Davies argues, artists and photographers created counter-narratives to official and media interpretations (243; also, Walklate, Mythen, and McGarry 152). Davies’s own video installation The Separation Line (2012) reproduced the ceremonies in size, duration, and camera perspective to offer “time and space” for reflection and reveal the “gap” between “ceremonial reality” and representation (244, 255-256). As a whole, the Wootton Bassett phenomenon contained the reality of British soldiers dying abroad in a public ritual of mourning and commemoration. The ceremonies thus exemplify a process of cultural signification and appropriation of the contemporary war experience through the exchange of competing and complementary narratives (Korte and Schneider, Introduction 4). As “key external event[s]” of the 2000s (Bentley, Hubble and Wilson, “Fiction” 4), the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had an impact on Britain comparable only to the effect of the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 (Chin 4). Yet, for a majority of the British population these wars never materialised as they did in the ritualised ‘body count’ of Wootton Bassett. The wars were waged far away, civilians were not in any real physical danger, nor was there compulsory military service as in earlier wars (M. Andrews 232). Elena V. Baraban, Stephan Jaeger, and Adam Muller argue that

1. Introduction

for most North Americans and Europeans the contexts in which people go to war with one another appear abstract…. Not having witnessed war directly, most Westerners come to understand and respond to these recent conflicts through their representations in journalism, politics, and Internet blogs, as well as in works of art, literature, and cinema. (6) Baraban, Jaeger, and Muller’s observations confirm that, for British audiences, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq existed almost exclusively as transmedia3 representations. In their virtual quality as media phenomena, the wars were as momentous and ever-present as they were distant and difficult to apprehend for people at home. Gillian Youngs argues that the wars possessed “pervasive qualities of vagueness” that distanced people “from the bigger picture” of the missions undertaken in their name (932). To make sense of war in the “age of hyperreality,” to render war meaningful as contemporary experience, “narrative … is all important,” Coker notes in a nod to Jean Baudrillard (Coker 9). The military campaigns may be carried out on Afghan and Iraqi battlefields, but the cultural meaning of recent warfare is fought out elsewhere: within the British home sphere and in a variety of British texts and media. To investigate the cultural negotiation of the British experience of recent warfare, the present project therefore looks at narrative representations of war. More specifically, the focus is on fictional narratives in British literature, drama, and film set against the backdrop of the largely concurrent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain’s most recent experiences of extended warfare. The study asks how the narratives conceive of these conflicts and how war, in turn, impacts on ideas of British life and culture. Evidently, narratives of war go beyond fiction: News reports and documentary, politics and historiography, memorials and museums, even “the productions of war planners and … the fantasies and theories of strategists” (Deer 1, 4)—they all tell stories of war. In War and Cinema, Paul Virilio claims: “There is no war … without representation” (6; also, Soncini 8). Still, literature has a specific relation to war representation. In Culture in Camouflage, Patrick Deer writes that literary texts have “a privileged perspective on the action” due to their “emphasis on personal expression, on witness and memory, on narrating the seemingly unnarratable, and on the role played by rhetoric in war-making” (5). It is impossible even to “identify ‘war itself’ as an entity apart from a powerful literary tradition,” Jean B. Elshtain observes (55). The assumption that through fictional narratives meaning is ascribed to complex cultural experiences is based on the premise that fiction is not antithetical to reality but the product of “acts of fictionalizing,” as Wolfgang Iser writes: “The fictive … might be called a ‘transitional object,’ always hovering between

3

This study uses Werner Wolf’s definition of transmedia as outlined by Marie-Laure Ryan: “phenomena … whose manifestation is not bound to a particular medium” (“Narration” par. 10).

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the real and the imaginary,” reproducing reality but also exceeding its limiting determinacy (20). More particularly, fictions of war introduce “imaginary positions in which conflicts can be safely explored and worked through to a potential resolution,” Graham Dawson explains in Soldier Heroes (20). A comprehensive history of war representation as a context for British narratives on contemporary war exceeds the bounds of this study, even if it is reduced to literary works. But it must be noted that war has given rise to a long line of texts and genres of cultural significance, ranging from classics like the Iliad (McLoughlin, Authoring) to World War I poetry and Cold War spy fiction (Hammond; also, Peebles 4-5). Kate McLoughlin argues in Authoring War that the history of the representation of war in literary texts and other fictional media reveals distinct lines of continuity. First and foremost, war narratives across the centuries share the “difficulty of conveying war’s extremeness” (McLoughlin, Authoring 16; also, Oostdijk 355). But “even as it resists representation, conflict demands it,” McLoughlin notes (Authoring 7). Indeed, war has produced a plethora of literary styles, themes, and aesthetics to reflect such diverse experiences as the trench warfare of the First World War (Booth) and the anxieties of the War on Terror (K. Miller). Rather than defining a new genre of Iraq and Afghanistan war fiction, this project explores the literary, dramatic, and film texts as contributions to the cultural negotiation of Britain at war today. Fictional narratives that deal with the recent conflicts tell their stories of war to come to terms with and render meaningful the contemporary experience of war. As fiction, they do not focus on ‘the facts’ of war but conceive of war as an experiential reality of British life. Given that war in general signifies a conflict between two parties, it comes as no surprise that research on literature of recent warfare emphasises the other side and explores them-versus-us constellations (e.g., A. de Waal, “(Sub)Versions”; Galli) or the negotiation of cultural differences (e.g., O’Gorman), including respective postcolonial implications. But these dichotomies are not the focus here. The present study is interested in the introversive ‘look at ourselves’ that characterises British narratives of recent warfare. The examined texts conceive of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq not primarily as military invasions of foreign territory by a Western alliance against terrorism but rather as an imaginary invasion of war into the British sphere of home, as a disruption that challenges cultural values, privileges, traditions. In War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain (2002), Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider state that any war has a profound effect on the construction of identity of those involved (Introduction 2). But more recently, Korte and Schneider go on to explain, the interest in this function of war is based on a “postmodern awareness” of the problematics of identity formation: States of war today draw attention to frictions between different levels of identity, such as communal and individual (Introduction 2-3). This renewed significance of war for what it means to be ‘us’ gives weight to the claim of the present study that, in the examined narratives,

1. Introduction

contemporary war appears as a violent irruption into British life. This invasion of war into the sphere of cultural belonging signifies discontinuity, defamiliarisation, and extraneousness and leads to a crisis of meaning and signification at home. Further, this study claims that fictional representations of recent warfare work to dissolve the strangeness and incommunicability of war to integrate the experience into their narrative of British life. The stories create or reveal an interconnection of culture and war to work against feelings of alienation and (re)discover war as a reflection of culture on itself. As the narratives play through this process of negotiating war, what remains is a sense of vulnerability and at the same time a sort of resistance, that is, a subjection to the grand event of war as well as a sense of continuity in the face of violent conflict. In the narratives examined in this study, the cultural self-perception of common British life under the strain of war is central. This concern links to how the history of mentalities, a branch of the French Annales school, thinks about cultural change. Unlike earlier approaches to cultural history, the history of mentalities does not look at high culture but is interested in the shifting “attitudes of ordinary people toward everyday life,” Patrick H. Hutton writes (“The History” 237). The approach focusses “on unspoken or unconscious assumptions, on perception, on the workings of ‘everyday thought’ or ‘practical reason,’” Peter Burke explains (162). Similarly, the present study investigates narratives that deal with ordinary people and their everyday experience of war rather than with decision-makers at the centre stage of politics. The history of mentalities is further concerned with gradual long-term developments (Hutton, “Mentalities” 801)—in that regard, Fernand Braudel’s “macrohistorical” work is paradigmatic (Andrea 605). The present study also looks at more subtle changes but does not claim to identify long-term shifts. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are too recent to argue for lasting effects as their impact competes with cultural “modes of resistance”: “the inertial power of habits of mind, conventions of speech, and visceral convictions that inhere in the common sense of tradition” (Hutton, “Mentalities” 801). More recent and future events may cast a different light on these conflicts. The present project therefore aims at identifying current strategies of dealing with and making sense of contemporary war in fictional narratives. The argument this study makes about the narrative negotiation of war as an intruder into British life rests on an idea of culture as a sphere of belonging, or ‘home,’ confronted with an unsettling, seemingly unfamiliar sphere of war. Home, in the present context, stands for what Isabel Capeloa Gil calls “the anthropological ordering enacted by culture”; in direct contrast, war signifies an “extraordinary experience of mutual destruction” (32). Gil notes that, against the backdrop of the modern-day nation-state and its inveterate bourgeois family ideal, the experience of war calls for a reaffirmation of the domestic order of home and family (32). The present study, however, argues that, since war not only invades home but is also

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allocated within the British experience in the examined narratives, home is not simply reaffirmed as it was. Rather, home is challenged by the exposition to war and transformed into a home/front4 —a home sphere that integrates or rediscovers traits of war. The terminological triad of home, war, and home/front that is central to this project will be further specified in chapter 2. In the present study, the theoretical underpinning for the process of negotiating home in the face of war is Yuri M. Lotman’s semiotic model of culture (chapter 3.1.) or, more precisely, his idea of a dynamic semiosphere that is defined as both the product of semiosis of a given culture and the precondition of its existence and development (Universe 125). To begin with, home and war are assigned to the opposition of semiosphere and extrasemiotic space. Just as Bernd Hüppauf defines war as an antithesis of culture (15), the fictions examined here designate war as external and alien to British culture—eagerly disregarding Britain’s active role in the actual campaigns abroad. Home, on the other hand, is in principle located at the centre of the semiosphere. Lotman, Russian semiotician and cultural historian, at one point defines home as a place of “one’s own … of safety, culture” (Universe 185). A crucial determinant of his model is the boundary of the semiosphere: It is, according to Lotman, a place of increased semiotic exchange (“On the Semiosphere” 208-209) or, in other words, a dynamic “mechanism” that accounts for the change of culture over time (Universe 136-137). For the present project, the boundary provides the infrastructure or ‘gateway’ for the semiotics of war to enter the cultural home sphere. Thus, the model is particularly suited to represent—to render visible and comprehensible—the reworking of home into a home/front. A reading of the selected works of prose literature, drama, and film along these lines facilitates an understanding of how fictional narratives contribute to the cultural conceivability of the wars, to the process of rendering war meaningful in the context of Britain today. The narrative configuration of this negotiation of home and war varies across texts and media. By way of example, Pat Barker’s short story “Subsidence,” published in the Guardian Review in July 2003, reveals how an interconnectedness of home and war may be established in fiction. In “Subsidence,” the primary sphere of belonging is the middle-class family of Ruth. Their home in the former coal district of County Durham stands on shaky ground: Cracks in the walls tell of the “cavernous darkness” of the disused coal mines in the ground beneath the house. On a figurative level, the broken plaster is symptomatic of the fading substance of Ruth’s marriage. Her husband Matt’s adulterous detachment from home and the communal subplot of the coal mining past resonate, subtly but significantly, with a third narrative thread: News reports on the war in Iraq, glossed over “like a bad 4

The spelling home/front is adopted here to avoid confusion with other uses of the term home front (chapter 2.3.).

1. Introduction

action movie,” claim Ruth’s attention. At first, the reports seem to be random occurrences of everyday life. But the reports are translated—in Lotman’s sense of the word—into a more invasive experience, as they interlink with the representation of family and community. Semiotic overlaps connect news reports and communal history: Because the area’s past is so vibrantly present in the mind of Ruth, the war journalists calling out “Gas! Gas! Gas!” in a television report she watches seem to echo the shouts of miners long since vanished from the community. Another passage interlinks war and family: When the falsity of the 2002 September Dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (chapter 2.1.) is reported on radio, the exposure of the betrayal of the public coincides with Ruth’s discovery of her husband’s marital infidelity. The breach of trust in the private home comes to signify the waning justification of the invasion—and vice versa. By establishing these connections, some more openly than others, “Subsidence” creates a continuity between the broken family of Ruth, Durham’s lost identity as a mining community, and the disillusioned country at war that makes for an insubstantial or ‘cracked’ home/front across private, communal, and national strata. All of the examined narratives of recent conflict bring into contact culture and warfare, but they explore different forms of connectedness. On the superordinate level of the present project, the interaction of home and war in the examined narratives is conceived as an invasion of war into the sphere of home. This term not only ironically inverts the fact that it was indeed British forces who intruded foreign countries (Araújo 62) and exposes the narratives as particularly self-involved representations. The term invasion also captures how the experience of war is understood as unsettling, overpowering, and incapacitating. On the level of the individual analyses, the narratives answer to the suspension of the order of home by negotiating a possible contact or even reconciliation between the spheres. They probe ways to render conceivable the violent experience of war that is introduced to the space of belonging. Each narrative presents this interrelation between the spheres on its own terms: The contact and subsequent interaction may be spelled out, for example, as a visual, acoustic, spatial, or associative merging of home and war spheres, as a superimposition of one sphere onto the other, as a seamless transition between home and war, as a temporary replacement of one sphere with the other, or as the build-up of a metaphoric imagery interrelating home and war. By exploring the allocation of war within the home sphere along these lines, the texts find their own ways to make sense of the recent wars. This primary interest of the present study is complemented by a second concern: the question how different media contribute to the cultural negotiation of the wars in media-specific ways. In turn, the project also investigates how war is represented beyond the limitations of a single medium. Therefore, the study’s material basis is intermedial if only, following Werner Wolf’s categorisation, in an extracompositional sense (29). With its transmedial corpus, the study reaches across “bound-

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aries between conventionally distinct media” (Wolf 19). The texts themselves are not transmedial in the sense of Henry Jenkins’s notion of transmedia storytelling as defined in Convergence Culture (2006).5 Still, the heightened interest in the mediality and intermediality of narrative in recent scholarship informs the present study (Ryan, “Narration” par. 30). Novel, drama, and film were chosen to exemplify the diversity of media fictionalising the recent wars.6 The British stage has responded quickly and with a wide variety of productions to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is also a considerable selection of film and television productions from the UK that are relevant to this study—though the respective US-American output overshadows British productions in number, public and critical recognition, and aesthetic and artistic influence (Hißnauer 183). British writers of narrative fiction took time to respond to the recent wars. Though there are a few early examples, only towards the end of the 2000s and reaching into the next decade contemporary warfare appears more frequently as a theme in the British novel.7 This study assembles media texts distinct in their mediality but also comparable on the level of the narrative: They are similar in terms of length, narrative complexity, and their propensity to create a coherent story world (e.g., Monaco 44).8 For Wolf, film and drama “continue to be more or less related to literature while having developed their own profile” (22). It is the way these media are used in the cultural context that entrusts them with a function similar to that of text-based literature, even if their character and conditions have led to distinct conventions of storytelling. The three main chapters of this project thus focus on culturally established, accessible storytelling media presenting fictional—or at least decidedly fictionalised—narratives that draw on the same general subject matter: the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. To limit the choice of texts, the project stipulates that this topical reference must be made explicit: Works included here may not necessarily present combat operations or foreign battlefields, but they all share a direct and not merely figurative reference on the story level to either or both of these wars to, again, ensure comparability across media boundaries. It is the experience of the reality of conflict—the manifestations, repercussions, problematics,

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6 7 8

The examined material is not intermedial in a narrow sense, i.e., telling a story “across more than one medium” (Wolf 19). The theatre project The Two Worlds of Charlie F. (2012) comes closest to being intermedial in that sense because its televised making-of Theatre of War (2012) extends the play’s story: the struggle of soldiers returning home from war permanently disabled. Nonfiction (e.g., documentaries, blogs, memoirs) also contributes to the cultural negotiation of the recent wars; but nonfiction formats are not investigated in the present project. For example, Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations (2015), Barney Campbell’s Rain (2015), and Catherine Hall’s Repercussions (2014) have been published relatively recently. Experimental forms of drama, for instance, are explicitly excluded in this study.

1. Introduction

absences the wars abroad cause in the cultural home sphere—that finds expression in these narratives. In other aspects, the selected media differ, for example, in terms of specific narrative conventions, means of storytelling, or target audiences. As Marie-Laure Ryan observes, “different media have different affordances, giving them different expressive power” (“Transmedial” 368). The respective differences spring from distinctions on various levels. In reference to Ryan, Wolf lists differences on the grounds of, for instance, mono- versus plurimediality (e.g., the text-based novel versus the audiovisual medium of film), spatio-temporal extension (e.g., prose fiction is temporal, theatre spatio-temporal), or the specific role the medium is assigned in culture (e.g., the status of theatre as high culture as opposed to television as popular culture) (38). The complex mediality of a given narrative, which this list of criteria reveals, is crucial: The medium is not just a neutral means to deliver information, the medium has an impact on the narrative content (Ryan, “Narration” par. 2). From this perspective, the narratives presented in novel, drama, and film can also be understood as three distinct cultural responses to recent warfare. The reflexivity and imagination of the novel (e.g., Ryan, “Transmedial” 368) are juxtaposed with the immediacy and affective potential of dramatic performance (e.g., Fischer-Lichte, Performativität 61-62) and the diversity and scope of audiovisual narration in film and television (e.g., Monaco 43, 49-50) to explore the possibilities and limitations of representing an unsettling or even traumatic war experience in different media. The novel is strictly text-based, at least in the cases relevant here, while drama and film, which use a variety of semiotic codes, are plurimedial (Wolf 27). The choice of media for this study of contemporary fictions of war seeks to balance a diversity of media perspectives with the compatibility of the results of the media-specific analyses. To make sure that an overall conclusion can be drawn in the end, the examinations of novel, drama, and film are guided by questions that apply to all media texts. These questions or, more generally, areas of interest arise from the elaborations in the following chapters. Based on the structural and terminological framework of Lotman’s notion of culture (chapter 3.1.), the present project’s understanding of contemporary war (chapter 2.1.), (the British) home (chapter 2.2.), and home/front (chapter 2.3.) yield analytical categories and aspects to govern a targeted analysis of the narratives set against the backdrop of the British military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq. The questions aim at the narrative construction of war, home, and home/front as constituents of the fictional negotiation of British life in times of contemporary warfare. The thesis of the present project suggests and investigates the interlinking of home and war spheres in the examined fictions. The modification of (spaces, ideas, and identities of) home in the context of war is the ultimate interest of the analyses. The specific areas of inquiry lead back to the general interest in the conflation of front (that is, war and

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its implications) and home (British culture) into a modified space of belonging that is captured in the term home/front. While this is the argumentative guideline of the present study, the three main chapters—which focus on novel (chapter 4.), drama (chapter 5.), and film (chapter 6.) respectively—are both synoptic and analytic. For one thing, the chapters introduce and examine the media-specific corpora of British works set against the backdrop of contemporary war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq that were identified in preparation for this project. Within these exploratory subchapters, selected texts are analysed more closely to sound out the diversity of narrative home/fronts in contemporary fictional media from the UK. Though on practical grounds most of the readings must be relatively brief, this approach offers the possibility to work out media-specific emphases that emerge beyond the individual texts. For another thing, the second part of each chapter further substantiates the proposed thesis of this study by presenting a more focussed in-depth analysis of a single text from the respective field. These close readings exemplify the affinities of the medium: Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here (2011) will illustrate the construction of the home/front in the text-based narrative of a novel (chapter 4.2.); the dramatic construction of a war-torn home identity is exemplified by Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006) (chapter 5.2.); and the television serial Occupation (2009) will be the object of the more detailed examination of the home/front in a film narrative (chapter 6.2.). In terms of content and setting, for instance, Occupation devotes much attention to the action in the war zone; Motortown shows a pronounced interest in the return of the soldier to a small-scale domestic setting; and the novel Wish You Were Here is particularly focussed on the inner world of its protagonist. In the concluding chapter, the results from the analyses will be consolidated to come to a transmedial understanding of the cultural response to contemporary warfare in British fictional media.

2. Contexts and State of Research

Much of the production of and research on British war literature and media today is concerned with older wars. The World Wars in particular “have become … prosthetic memories,” as Maggie Andrews observes; their narratives are so excessively repeated that they are available as “intimate … memories” for anyone (234). The continued relevance of the Great War (1914-1918) is not least exemplified by popular drama series such as Downton Abbey (2010-2015), in which World War I is, once again, confirmed as a “turning point” for the development of national identity, as a moment of drastic cultural change (Baena and Byker 262, 265). In Cultural Heritage of the Great War in Britain (2013), Ross J. Wilson confirms that this war “still haunts modern society” (1). And the same holds true for the Second World War (1939-1945): Recent cultural production, ranging from blockbusters like Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) to academic studies such as Petra Rau’s Long Shadows (2016), still upholds World War II as a cultural reference point for present-day Britain. More recent experiences of war are yet to be conceived in culture. The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century British and American War Literature (2012), for example, deliberately “stop[s] short of the wars in the Middle East, in the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, for that story is still being written and told” (Piette and Rawlinson, Introduction 3). When research does address the cultural representation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are usually embedded in one of the defining discourses of the early twenty-first century: America’s (Global) War on Terror(ism). This campaign, “a representation of events, a rhetorical construction, a series of stories about 9/11 and about America’s place in the world” (Holloway 4), determines the public, literary, and academic perception of the military missions waged in its name. Book-length publications in this field include David Holloway’s 9/11 and the War on Terror (2008), Daniel O’Gorman’s Fictions of the War on Terror (2015), and Susana Araújo’s Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror. As the present study focusses on British representations, it is important to note that “the lion’s share of [academic and popular press] literature is focussed on the experiences of the United States,” as Warren Chin notes in Britain and the War on Terror (2013) (3). For obvious reasons, 9/11 and the War on Terror are publicly discussed, fictionalised, and theorised mainly as American concerns. Besides, themes like terrorism, secu-

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rity, trauma, or cultural differences are also much more prominent in fiction and research than the military side of the War on Terror, for example, in Katharina Donn’s A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11 (2017) or Tim Gauthier’s 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (2015). Much is still to be said about Afghanistan and Iraq as cultural experiences of war and about the literary, dramatic, and cinematic reactions they inspired, especially if the focus is on the cultural context of the UK. The exclusively British perspective of the present project concerns authorship and production context as well as narrative setting, principal characters, and general focus of the narratives. That is, this study is interested in stories that (re)create British life-worlds and experiences in the face of military warfare abroad. Texts and media from other cultural contexts may have also had an impact on the British reception of the recent wars. Especially American representations, most certainly blockbuster productions like Kathryn Bigelow’s Academy Award-winning film The Hurt Locker (2008), received their fair share of attention from UK audiences. Suman Gupta also observes “a heightened interest” in Middle Eastern poetry during the Iraq War, both in Britain and in the United States (16). Still, such material must be the object of another study. The present project’s corpus alone covers more than a decade of UK writing and filmmaking. Indeed, the production of contemporary British literature and media dealing with the recent wars provides a wealth of material that substantiates an investigation of specifically British responses to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And even if there is extensive research on corresponding US narratives, insights gained from studies of material from the United States can never compensate for an examination of the British narratives, for “media and war are handled differently by different nations” (Schubart 5). Chin observes that “the British experience as an occupying army proved to be very different to that which emerged in the American area of operations” (106). Thus, even if Britain and the US were allies in Afghanistan and Iraq and share cultural and political affinities, they also have distinct cultural, political, and historical perspectives on these conflicts. So far, scholarship on the literary and cultural representation of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars has rarely focussed on British material exclusively. Individual works from the UK are, however, included in studies on 9/11 and the War on Terror with an American or international outlook. Some publications seek to balance perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic, for example, Gupta’s Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion (2011) or Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget’s The ‘War on Terror’: Post-9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary (2015). Kristine A. Miller’s Transatlantic Literature and Culture after 9/11 (2014) also addresses texts from the US and Britain, but the essays in her volume again rather deal with the theme of terrorism and only touch upon the wars as part of the War on Terror narrative. Gupta’s work comes closest to the present study, because it also takes a transmedial approach and deals with literature of the war in Iraq in particular, not the wider War on Terror. And though Gupta writes about

2. Contexts and State of Research

English-language literature in general, as a UK-based scholar, he appears to be particularly aware of British texts. Other than the present study, however, Gupta’s project only looks at material produced between 2003 and 2005. In addition, Gupta has a rather specific objective: to investigate how literature on the Iraq invasion provides insight into “the recent and current condition of literature” (13)—whereas the present study focusses on the current condition of culture as it emerges in literature, drama, and film. Much of the relevant research literature has a transmedial perspective. Apart from the studies by O’Gorman and Araújo, few works focus primarily on the novel—and such studies, again, rarely deal with texts focussing on the military campaigns. Film studies, possibly due to the strong tradition of the war film genre, more frequently focus on the military side of the War on Terror. Martin Barker’s A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (2011) analyses more than twenty works but only includes two films from a British production context—one of which, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (2007), deals with a group of US Marines rather than UK troops. Rikke Schubart, Fabian Virchow, Debra White-Stanley, and Tanja Thomas’s War Isn’t Hell It’s Entertainment (2009) looks at contemporary visual representations of war more generally. Following James Der Derian’s Virtuous War (2001), Schubart and her colleagues are interested in the long-standing entanglement of war, media, and entertainment industries (Schubart 2). In the context of 9/11 and facilitated by digitisation, the “morphing [of these industries] into one another” spread far beyond the US, Schubart explains, blurring the boundaries of war, media, and entertainment on a global scale (4). Next to its focus on film, Stacey Peebles’s Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq (2011) also includes other media but, again, deals with an American perspective on war. Still, Peebles’s work stresses the significance of the soldier figure to conceive of contemporary war as lived experience rather than virtual representation (if, remarkably enough, in representation) that also holds true for the present project. Studies on post-9/11 film occasionally include a separate chapter on Iraq War films, such as Douglas Kellner’s Cinema Wars (2010). As a matter of fact, if recent warfare is addressed in fiction or research, Iraq as the more contentious conflict of the two is usually focussed (Peebles 2). German scholarship, such as Carsten Gansel and Heinrich Kaulen’s Kriegsdiskurse in Literatur und Medien nach 1989 (2011) and Christa Karpenstein-Eßbach’s Orte der Grausamkeit (2011), expectably focus on other recent wars, such as the Balkans or a variety of smaller conflicts. Scholarship on the contribution of British theatre to the negotiation of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is comparatively numerous. Plays written and produced in reference to these wars are addressed by Sara Soncini in her study Forms of Conflict (2015), by Ariane de Waal in Theatre on Terror (2017), and by Julia Boll in The New War Plays (2013), to name but a few. The relevance of British drama in this field is also reflected in more

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general studies on contemporary theatre which, when addressing documentary drama, almost invariably include plays that deal with the wars.1 Texts and media of contemporary war are of course also addressed in shorter academic articles. These will be taken into consideration in the analyses later on. Still, some of the works examined here have not been explored in research yet. As the brief overview above reveals, much remains to be said about the British response—in fiction and across media boundaries—to the contemporary experience of the wars waged in Afghanistan and Iraq.

2.1.

War

This project considers texts that openly reference Britain’s recent campaigns in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. This is not to say that all material necessarily represents combat action or even military operations more generally. For Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers, war is essentially defined by “the use of force” (“Fighting is what defines war”) and characterised by “contention” based on “reciprocity” (Introduction 6-7)2 ; and Susan Sontag calls war “a huge tapestry of actions” (“Regarding the Torture”). The present project adopts a yet more inclusive understanding of the term: A culture’s notion and perception of war is constituted as a nexus of events, debates, and experiences that includes but also exceeds military action. War is constituted at the intersection of military action, discourse, and historico-cultural conception, Hüppauf confirms in Was ist Krieg?, his monograph on the cultural history of war (24). Paul Virilio adds that war is not determined by “territorial, economic or other material victories” but rather by the appropriation of immaterial “perceptual fields” (7). In other words, war is a fight over ways of seeing and thinking. This is important because the invasion of Iraq, at least from a conventional point of view, does not qualify as war: The military action of the US-led coalition was not fully regulated by international law, nor was military power distributed equally among the parties involved in the fighting (Gupta 19, 141; also, Youngs 929); the Iraq War was an asymmetrical conflict (Chin 143). For Gupta, using the term war rather than invasion detracts attention from the ethical dilemmas of the deployment: War denotes a confrontation of largely equal opponents and conceals the disruption of civil spheres that the term invasion implies (141). Moreover, “in the civil sphere,” Gupta notes, “the invasion was … understood as reflexively within

1 2

For more details regarding the state of research on British narratives of contemporary war in prose fiction, stage plays, film and television, see the respective chapters in this study. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers’s list also includes “a degree of intensity and duration,” combatants who do not act “in a private capacity,” and some “aim beyond fighting itself” (Introduction 7).

2. Contexts and State of Research

the home-fronts and indeed on the home-fronts in various ways” (103-104). Thus, when the narratives examined here conceive of the wars as invasions into the home sphere, they ironically invert the fact that it was the British forces who intruded into foreign spheres (Araújo 62). The actual narrative configuration of war will be addressed in the textual analyses of the present project: How do the novels, dramas, and films conceive of war? Which aspects and issues of the “amorphous amalgamate[s] of belligerent actions” (Boll 1) in Afghanistan and Iraq do they address? Which facets of war clash with the British home sphere? And which familiar cultural codes and images are used to make sense of war, to inscribe it into the narrative of home? But before such questions can be addressed, some context is necessary regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in general and the British role within and perspective on these conflicts in particular. Over the past decades, theorists have dealt with a perceived change in the nature of warfare. As Boll contends, contemporary conflict, blurring the lines between “frontline and homeland, … war and peace,” does not follow the rules of twentiethcentury state warfare (1). A key aspect of theories of post-1989 warfare, such as Herfried Münkler’s or Mary Kaldor’s new wars theories, is the asymmetry between state and nonstate actors. In The Changing Character of War, Strachan and Scheipers note that “part of the problem with much operational thought in the 1990s was that it had forgotten that the enemy has a vote and that his responses might be ‘asymmetrical’ or even unpredictable” (Introduction 7). William S. Lind’s fourth generation warfare school pays specific attention to the effects of this asymmetry. Lind takes into consideration new weapons and tactics, “including terrorism and immigration,” that make strategies of interstate warfare redundant (Chin 9-10). Some literary scholarship on contemporary wars, like Boll’s The New War Plays or Rasmus Greiner’s film study Die neuen Kriege im Film (2012), conceive of Afghanistan and Iraq as new wars in this sense and claim that they call for new representational approaches (Greiner, “Die neuen Kriege” 9). The present project is not interested in classifying its material according to such concepts from political or social sciences. This study rather looks at the recent conflicts as cultural experiences of war—regardless of whether the military deployments qualify as war in terms of political studies, international law, or other disciplines and irrespective of whether they challenge traditional notions of war. What matters is that the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were publicly represented and perceived as wars in the British cultural sphere. Indeed, Gupta notes that the invasion of Iraq “was surrounded so comprehensively by talk of war that it appeared to become war” (20)—especially in the literary imagination (141). And it is in this sense that the present project speaks of wars and warfare. In practical terms, war in this study refers to a number of events, contexts, and debates that determined the perception of the conflicts in Britain. It was the

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militarised American rhetoric in the aftermath of 9/11 that had set the scene for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (Holland 2). And these missions would, for more than a decade, be the figurehead of the proclaimed War on Terror (Chin 34). The campaigns were (and are) received within the discursive frame of the War on Terror. Yet, especially from a British perspective, the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq are not to be understood as manifestations of this figurative war alone. In fact, Britain looks back at a long line of military campaigns on Afghan battlegrounds, dating back as far as 1839. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, Western states had intervened for decades, if not centuries, and both had their distinct contexts, conditions, and problematics. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Afghanistan had appeared as “the logical primary target” for the US and its allies as the Taliban-ruled country provided a safe haven for terrorist organisations (Yorke 360). But Iraq was a highly controversial objective. The 2003 invasion of Baghdad was also not the first intervention of Western troops on these battlegrounds. It was preceded by the UN-mandated Gulf War of 1990/91 and by Operation Desert Fox, a 1998 bombing campaign conducted by US and British forces to ‘remind’ Iraq of UN regulations (Chin 79). Some of the examined war narratives take note of this historical depth and of UK military history more generally; lessons of war history are weaved, for instance, into Owen Sheers’s play The Two Worlds of Charlie F. (2012) and Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006) (chapter 5.1.3.). In early 2002, the US began to make efforts to resume military action in Iraq (Holland 135). The invasion in March 2003 was disputed, to say the least. For quite a while, the “unwinnable folly in Iraq” (Sontag, “Regarding the Torture”) directed attention away from the less controversial engagement in Afghanistan. Not before 2009, for instance, when The Great Game: Afghanistan, a series of playlets, ran at London’s Tricycle Theatre (Kent 7), did the British stage react to this earlier conflict. On the operational side, the British had already increased their rebuilding efforts in Helmand province three years before and thus much earlier than the Americans (Chin 143, 157). But the British efforts were thwarted by the inadequate assessment of Taliban resistance: Fatality numbers among British troops rose sharply after 2006 (Chin 144-145, 157). In combination, the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq revived, once more, an experience of war in Britain that seemed to have passed away along with the twentieth century: long-lasting conflicts, costly in terms of materials input as well as health and life of British troops. Western forces quickly succeeded in disempowering the targeted regimes in both theatres of war but then struggled for years as post-invasion peacekeeping and rebuilding were hampered by prolonged low intensity insurgencies (Strachan 4). Since then, other strategies for the use of military force, such as targeted special forces operations, were adopted to take the War on Terror into the next decade (Chin 4-5). Anne-Marie Slaughter even hypothesises that Afghanistan and Iraq might end “boots-on-the-grounds” interstate warfare altogether (Fidler et al. 5; also, Chin 4).

2. Contexts and State of Research

Both wars were initiated and dominated by the US. Britain played “a not insignificant but essentially junior role” in the alliance (Yorke 407). Its New Labour government claimed to be on an equal footing with America, but Ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer expressed his concern that Britain failed to realise its influence in Washington (81) and sacrificed its national interests (Chin 77). The US welcomed the British contribution (Keegan 172) but emphasised that they could defeat Baghdad on their own if necessary (Chin 8). It was Blair’s government that relied on “collective security and the ‘special relationship’” with the US (Cawkwell 13; also, Fairclough); and it was believed that the PM’s “personality and leadership style” led to Britain’s participation in the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, a position Stephen B. Dyson corroborates (289). Though others, such as James de Waal, disagree (vi; also, Johnson, Introduction 8), the wars were commonly seen as “Blair’s wars” (Kampfner) or “Blair’s Vietnam” (Danchev, “Tony” 189). In fictional media, Blair is repeatedly brought to life to examine his role in the wars. According to Stella Bruzzi, satirical portrayals in particular utilise the PM’s “performative ambiguity” (134). Tracing the formation of New Labour’s foreign policy before 9/11, Jack Holland emphasises Blair’s claim of British leadership on the global stage if “not as a superpower” then at least “as a pivotal power” (60). Invoking “romanticised images of a glorious imperial past,” Blair appealed to postimperial sensibilities that rested on ideas of insular exceptionalism, freedom, and independence, Holland notes (59; 64). Blair also presented the UK as a “transatlantic bridge,” seeking to consolidate pro-US and pro-European positions that, until then, had been seen as mutually exclusive (Holland 56). And the PM put forth the notion of a British obligation to the international community, promoting and rationalising interventionism on moral grounds (Holland 58). That Britain ought to be a “force for good” became a “Blairite mantra” (Danchev, On Art 222). Only weeks after Blair’s pledge on 11 September 2001 to “stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends” (“Blair’s”; also, Yorke 364), British troops were sent to Afghanistan. At the time, there was little controversy about this campaign, which “had all the prospects of being a ‘good’ war, with a high level of international legitimacy,” Edmund Yorke explains, and “firmly in line with Blair’s much-trumpeted 1997 pronouncement of an ‘ethical dimension’ to Labour foreign policy” (365). But Blair’s belief in the “tenacious myth” of a special bond with the US (Jon Cook 22) soon committed Britain to another war effort, which few of the Western nations were willing to support: preemptive regime change in Iraq. There was considerable opposition to this war in politics and news media (Keegan 176)—and among the populace. On 15 February 2003, an unprecedented number of people gathered in London and Glasgow to march against military action in Iraq, joined by millions in coordinated events around the world (Tarrow viii). The rallies provide the subject matter for a number of texts and media, such as Alison Miller’s novel Demo (2005) (chapter 4.1.1.). In spite of the public outcry, a small majority of 54 percent backed

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the war effort at the time of invasion—a fact often ignored as general disapproval set in afterwards (Dahlgreen). In the 2016 Chilcot Report, the board of inquiry into the government’s policy on Iraq concluded that Blair had “overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq” and had committed himself to war “before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort” (Chilcot 1). Despite the British expertise in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, UK military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq failed “at the grand strategic level” (Chin 9, 12). And the decisions on the levels of politics and military strategy also had an impact on the perception, experience, and representation of the wars on social and individual levels. In this sense, the political and military domains affect the examined fictional narratives, even though the stories centre on those not in power, such as civilians and lower-ranking soldiers. For instance, troops were not granted recommended intervals of rest and recuperation (Chin 37). Such resource problematics (Chin 13) are reflected in the narratives of war examined here in the prolonged absences of serving family members from home and in the frustration of soldiers in the field. There was also an intense debate about the ethics and justification of going to war. A dark cloud was cast on the war in Iraq in particular when the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib by US forces became public. Similar cases involving British soldiers also came to light—with far reaching consequences for more than those directly involved (Kerr 402). As the judgement of the soldiers’ actions blended with the discussion of “the rights and wrongs of the war,” nothing less than “the legitimacy of British involvement in Iraq, the responsibility of the British Government, and the future of the military justice system” were at stake, Rachel Kerr argues (402). The incidents called into question the moral aspiration of the British presence abroad, which Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins had captured in an “inspiring eve-of-battle speech” that came to public attention (Keegan 167)—and thus had an impact “far beyond its immediate sociocultural context” (Butt, Lukin, and Matthiessen 276): I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them.… You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest—for your deeds will follow you down through history. (Collins) The moral guidance of this speech is, for instance, reflected in the television film The Mark of Cain (2007) (chapter 6.1.4.) or the short film series 10 Days to War (2008), in which Collins’s rhetoric is reenacted with some pathos by actor Kenneth Branagh (chapter 6.1.2.). The ethical dimension of the wars is closely linked to the debate on the nature of the visual image and the ‘ethics of empathy’ that was sparked by the Abu Ghraib pictures. Much of this debate refers to Susan Sontag’s thoughts on the function

2. Contexts and State of Research

of photographic images of war and disaster in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) and to Judith Butler’s Frames of War (2009), which discusses the link between representation and the grievability of life. “The Western memory museum,” Sontag claims, “is now mostly a visual one” (“Regarding the Torture”). The history of the 2000s, the decade of the recent wars, “can be summoned by iconic images,” Jeanne Colleran confirms (14). The ethics of representation are addressed in a number of the examined fictions. Pat Barker’s novel Double Vision (2003) even refers explicitly to Sontag’s book (chapter 4.1.2.). The visuality of the wars is directly linked to their extensive media representation. Citing Douglas Kellner, Colleran argues that the media is the contemporary “site of culture,” the place of power and social control (19). This media dominance changes “the relationship between war and society,” Mark Imber and Trudy Fraser note in reference to Colin McInnes: Wars safely presented on television neatly separate the civilian viewer from the professional combatant in the field (384). At the same time, new communications technologies give power to media audiences to impact on foreign policy, Imber and Fraser add (384). The significance of media technology and representation features prominently in the examined narratives—notably in the text-based medium of the novel, for example, in Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005) (chapter 4.1.5.). Attention will be paid to how the texts reflect the immaterial presence of war as an experience for a mass audience in the sheltered space of home. A number of “headline events” (Hubble, Tew, and Wilson x)—many of which took place in the UK rather than on foreign battlefields—characterise the British experience of the wars more specifically. In fiction, these events function as domestic manifestations of the distant, intangible conflicts. The massive antiwar protests in early 2003, for example, made the headlines in the run-up to the Iraq War. As narrative events, the protests provide occasion to address key issues and events of this phase, such as the doubtful legal basis for an invasion of Iraq (Independent), the efforts to procure support at the UN, and the vote for war in the House of Commons in March 2003 (Chin 90). Of critical importance for the British experience of the Iraq War was also the September Dossier, a report issued in 2002 that claimed Iraq secretly possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a parliamentary debate in March 2003, Blair used the arguments of this report to justify a preemptive strike against Iraq (Bentley, Hubble, and Wilson, “Timeline” 254-255), disregarding objections from UN weapons inspector Hans Blix (Lewis 298). Eventually, Blix would call the Iraq War “illegal” (Holloway 164). In May 2003, just weeks after the invasion, BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan reported that the dossier had been “sexed up” (BBC, “How BBC”; also, Keegan 213-214). British UN weapons expert David Kelly was quickly identified as his source. Kelly’s suspicious death in July “provoked a full-blooded political crisis in the United Kingdom” but was eventually rated a suicide in the Hutton Inquiry, which also acquitted the government

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of wilful misinformation and undue interference (Keegan 216). In fiction, drama, and film, the affair is frequently addressed, for instance in the television film The Government Inspector (2005) (chapter 6.1.2.). Another event that dominated the headlines for weeks on end were the coordinated attacks on London’s public transport system in July 2005, in which 52 people were killed and many more injured. In the style of 9/11, they came to be known as 7/7. In the public mind, the attacks were linked directly to the British military overseas engagement in the War on Terror (Chin 37). But scholars also see a link between warfare and terrorism. Mary Kaldor writes in New and Old Wars (2006): “The terrorism experienced in places such as New York, Madrid or London, as well as in Israel or Iraq, can be understood as a variant of new strategy—the use of spectacular, often gruesome, violence to create fear and conflict” (9). Euphoria over the acceptance of London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics only the day before was blighted by the bombings, which fuelled domestic opposition to the wars (Holland 172). The fact that UK forces were technologically not as well-equipped as their ally also came to public attention. Yet, the British were seen as particularly capable in special operations, counterinsurgency, and urban warfare and were therefore put in charge of Iraq’s second largest city Basra (Keegan 175; also, Ball 554). In the television series Occupation, for instance, Basra’s labyrinthine streets provide an important setting in one of the narrative threads (chapter 6.2.). Ostensibly, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were successful: Basra was taken quickly by the British (Keegan 175) and the regime in Kabul was toppled within weeks. But commenting on the military campaigns, Colleran explains: “For a decade, the War on Terror was successful in ways that mattered little … and unsuccessful in ways that mattered most, wreaking lasting damage on [the homeland]” (13-14). The invasions, Yorke points out, soon proved to be hollow victories, undermined by “a continued fallacious emphasis upon fighting a war” rather than building peace (361). As the occupations dragged on, Britain operated for years on two fronts when its forces were not laid out for such demands (Chin 37). The situation of the “badly overstretched … forces” was aggravated by the “tight budget” granted for the unpopular missions (Chin 37). Troops complained about deficient and inadequate equipment (Meek, “Off Target”), which also provides a source of disillusionment for the soldiers in the film The Patrol (2013) (chapter 6.1.1.). Moreover, casualty numbers, low at first (Keegan 182), increased noticeably when, in the post-invasion phase, insurgent groups in both theatres of operations switched to a strategy of planting “deadly roadside IEDs (improvised explosive devices) to kill British and Coalition troops” (Yorke 373). The IED emerged as the real and symbolic faceless threat of the post-invasion insurgencies. In Playing the Great Game (2012), Yorke holds responsible UK strategists in particular for not reacting adequately to the enemy because of the country’s “historical experience in this region” (407). Yorke argues that “Government failures, if not outright betrayal” allowed post-invasion Afghanistan to

2. Contexts and State of Research

become a death trap for British soldiers and therefore led to a low point in troop morale (409; also, Chin 12). The end of combat missions and the withdrawal of troops in 2009 and 2014 respectively, save those in training and advisory capacities (Ministry of Defence, “Britain”), as well as the 2016 Chilcot Report set a tentative end to these wars. Full closure, real or perceived, is unlikely to follow anytime soon, for both Afghanistan and Iraq remain sources of unrest (Luckhurst, “In War Times” 214). In August 2017, the US announced to once again increase their troops in Afghanistan and to continue their presence indefinitely, rescinding earlier statements of complete withdrawal (Nakamura and Phillip). As Yorke concludes, “there is along [sic] way to go” (413). Such long-term military engagements as those in Afghanistan and Iraq may seem less surprising if one follows Julia Boll’s observation that, over the past decades, war “has become the status quo and the main force for the organization of society” (1). Yet, this observation clashes with the fact that, at the same time, “risk aversion is now so entrenched in the collective consciousness that we tend to write off almost all risk-taking as abnormal, or pathological” (Coker ix). Within the analyses later in the present study, attention will be paid to this tension and to how home is characterised through the explicit or implicit construction of an exterior, unfamiliar, nonsemiotic space of war, the polar complement that shapes home ex negativo. Still, historically speaking, war is the rule. In the context of British contemporary consumer culture war is something (artificially) externalised—or rebranded: Democracies’ “practical security needs” further coalitions such as NATO, which after the dissolution of the Eastern bloc readjusted its attention to less tangible threats (e.g., terrorism) and adopted a strategy of “proactive risk management” (Daase 86-87). For Sara Soncini, the presence of war following 9/11 has by now transformed war, once again, “from a state of exception into the new modus vivendi” (3). And Boll notes that “Western society defines itself increasingly via its involvement in these wars” (2; also, 34). But how, if at all, do popular fictional narratives deal with the fact that war might be actually part of culture? How do they inscribe war into their image of culture? To understand Britain’s relation to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, historical contexts must be taken into account. British culture is shaped by an awareness of its former global power—by now, either lost or transformed (Ball 539). In some parts, regional histories of warfare have created centuries-old military identities (Keegan 168), prominently staged in Black Watch (chapter 5.1.3.). The Anglo-Afghan conflict reaches as far back as the early nineteenth century. But the industrial-scale World Wars are the fallback level for the cultural conception of war, even though the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq by no means “replicate” their conditions (Imber and Fraser 384). The World Wars have established persistent tropes of commemoration as well as ideas of the British home front braving the Blitz and defending the homeland against invasion from outside (Youngs 926). Fictions of the recent wars,

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such as Catherine Hall’s novel The Repercussions (2000) (chapter 4.1.3.), still draw on these epochal wars to conceive of ways to think about the experience of conflict today. Younger conflicts, such as the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Troubles in Ireland, the 1982 defence of British rule on the Falkland Islands, and NATO peacekeeping missions in the Balkans, are referred to less frequently. For Victoria M. Basham, “the UK is more a welfare than a warfare state” (War 21). But the culture of war remembrance, substantially shaped during the Great War of 1914 to 1918, is of heightened relevance in the context of prolonged warfare after 2001; the Wootton Bassett ceremonies (chapter 1.) make use of this tradition. A war memorial dedicated to the soldiers killed in the World Wars is “a standard feature” of British towns and villages; and today, they carry the names of servicemen who died in Iraq and Afghanistan as well (Imber and Fraser 384). Usually placed in the communal centre, the memorials reference London’s own central war memorial, the Cenotaph in Whitehall. As Bill Niven explains, the memorials “operate … at the nexus of politics and culture” (39). In the context of the First World War, the monuments came to express a shared national grief, epitomised in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, rather than the political triumph of the victor (Niven 39-40). In Britain, the memorials have been used for spontaneous expressions on the communal level, though Niven cautions against reading these as truly democratised forms of remembrance (40). The case of Royal Wootton Bassett exemplifies how spontaneous forms of war remembrance attract a degree of political control and appropriation. The central ritual of British war commemoration are the countrywide ceremonies on Remembrance Sunday, which were introduced to remember Armistice Day on 11 November 1918 (Imber and Fraser 385). Imber and Fraser’s empirical study shows that despite antiwar sentiments in the context of the Iraq War (388) such traditional forms of remembrance are still relevant in the present-day context of Afghanistan and Iraq (394). In Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here, for example, the date and the annual rituals take a prominent position in the life of the protagonist (chapter 4.2.). In conclusion, the representation and negotiation of the recent wars in contemporary culture not only draw upon a complex network of current debates, discourses, and events of war at home and abroad. The cultural responses also refer back to previous experiences and narratives of war, that is, to earlier notions of war that still prevail in the British home sphere.

2.2.

Home

The cultural home sphere of Britain and its reaction to recent warfare in fiction is the focus of this study. The examined material is both a product of this sphere and centrally concerned with British life and culture. Rather than directing atten-

2. Contexts and State of Research

tion to the hostile environment of enemy country and culture, the wars bring on a crisis at home that provokes a reflection of home on itself and draws attention to home culture and self-understanding. In fact, occasional statements in reviews and analyses that stories from this study’s corpus are “not really about war” (M. Barker 112; also, e.g., Lacey 4) may be attributed to this focus on home. As Gunther Gebhard, Oliver Geisler, and Steffen Schröter note in their introduction to Heimat (2007), the contact with abroad—with the alien, external, and unfamiliar—renders visible and raises to a level of reflexivity the meaning of home (17). Situations of crisis, more particularly, provoke a moment of inquiry into the condition of self and society that interlinks the global and the everyday (Horton, Contemporary 3). The theme of war, implicating politics and state action on an international level, immediately suggests the idea of a national home(land). But it is a wider cultural community, not just the political community of the nation, that the present study is interested in. Cultural and national affiliation overlap but are not synonymous and, as Rosemary M. George notes in The Politics of Home (1996), fiction usually privileges representations of home over negotiations of national identity: “while the nation is the object and subject of nationalist narratives, literary narratives are more centrally concerned with the idea of home” (11-12). Any definition of collective identity condenses a “living pluralism” and “actual inequality” to the idea of a unified collective, as Benedict Anderson notes in Imagined Communities (7). Though he focusses on nation and nationality, Anderson asserts that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” (6). In other words, community is constituted as the idea of a unified collective in the minds of its members “regardless of the actual inequality” (Anderson 7). Similarly, in the present study, the term home is used to capture an idea of British belonging and self-understanding based on unity rather than plurality of British culture and society. The creation of unity and continuity for something that is, in reality, diverse and discontinuous is also to be found in Yuri Lotman’s model of culture: The semiosphere is “at the same time unequal yet unified, asymmetrical yet uniform” (Universe 131). As Edna Andrews explains, it “gives a name to the sense of continuity peoples often feel about themselves and others as groups that are defined by an infinite number of ever-changing, dynamic discontinuities” (175). Home, as it is used in the present project, brings together such ideas of individual, familial, communal, national, cultural membership or affiliation. The term is chosen for denoting spheres of inclusion on a scale ranging from homeland to ‘hearth and home,’ from sense of self to in-group identity and national community, from citizenship to the place of origin and the dwelling place.3 3

The Oxford English Dictionary defines home as “[a] dwelling place; a person’s house or abode; the fixed residence of a family …; the seat of domestic life and interests”; “a private house or residence considered merely as a building”; “[t]he place where one lives or was brought up,

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As a concept, home has been theorised by various disciplines for different purposes. According to Shelley Mallett’s “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature” (2004), home is a “multidimensional concept” that addresses “people’s complex and diverse lived experience” (64). And the seemingly reasonable claim that home “immediately connotes the private sphere of patriarchal hierarchy, gendered self-identity, shelter, comfort, nurture and protection” (George 1) only holds true within a specific context. Mallett concludes that the term home is “a repository for complex, inter-related and … contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationship with one another, especially family, and with places, spaces, and things” (84). Any definition of the term must necessarily be limited as it serves particular interests. The present study’s use of the term home with its strong reference to a concrete (dwelling) place goes hand with an emphasis on physical spaces and places. Both the focus on home space(s) and the use of Lotman’s spatial model place the study in the context of theories of space. Since the so-called spatial turn, proclaimed in Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies (1989) and elaborated in Thirdspace (1996), categories of space have received much attention in critical thinking across the disciplines (Winkler, Seifert, and Detering 254; also, Günzel). The focus of the present study on British home culture also implies the relevance of meaningful actual spaces and places (e.g., London as centre). Yet, it is only within the examined fictions that reallife home spaces play a role here. That this study stays firmly within the realm of represented space is characteristic of literary and cultural studies perspectives on space, as Kathrin Winkler, Kim Seifert, and Heinrich Detering explain; this distinguishes most literary approaches to space from the spatial turn’s original interest in bringing together real and imagined space (259). Because notions of space are introduced via a primary interest in the narrative (imagined) renegotiation of culture, this project does not discuss at length the complex field of spatial theories beyond Lotman’s model of the semiosphere (chapter 3.1.) and, if briefly, Michel Foucault’s heterotopia (chapter 3.3.). Home seems to be a universal concept, if only in the sense that everyone seems to have some understanding of home. Chosen for its inclusiveness, the term is at the same time elusive; it cannot be pinned down to a substantial definition beyond the tentative proposition that home apparently always comprises a “pattern … of exclusions” (George 18). Home creates unity by defining who and what does not belong. And this is precisely what constitutes Lotman’s semiosphere: the separation of the meaningful semiotics of culture from the nonsemiotic external other (“On the Semiosphere” 205). For the same reason, the delimitation of home is closely related to the formation of identity. “The conflation of home and self,” George observes, with reference to the feelings of belonging”; “[a] person’s own country or native land”; the “place where something originates, flourishes, or is most typically found.”

2. Contexts and State of Research

pervades the interdisciplinary discourse of home (19). Humanistic geography, for instance, sees home as a foundation of self, Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling write in Home (2006). Home is “an essential place,” Blunt and Dowling add, “through which [people] make sense of their world” (11). Identity is linked to and created by the “lived and imaginative experiences of home,” Blunt and Dowling specify (24). Apart from this primary idea of belonging, the use of the term home in this study is based on a number of characteristic yet not essential aspects, which provide a guideline rather than a set of rules for the reading of the fictional home spheres. It must also be noted that home is determined by context and within this study always refers to a Western or Euro-American perspective (D. Morley 25). Many studies in the field acknowledge the existence of widespread intuitive, commonplace notions of home. But whether home is approached from an everyday perspective or from a more analytic angle, notions of home usually comprise aspects of both ideal and lived homes, George explains (2). Blunt and Dowling confirm that a “central feature of imaginaries of home is their idealization” (100). In reference to Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche (1919), translated to the uncanny or the unhomely, Blunt and Dowling call this ideal the “homely” home (26), an untainted but, in reality, also unattainable sphere of belonging. The family home ideal, for example, locates home “in other places and times,” “in an unchanging past,” “in nature” and often suggests “heritage,” “power and success” (Blunt and Dowling 246). Such imaginary constructions stand in contrast to experiences of alienation—the “unhomely” home (D. Morley 19-20; Blunt and Dowling 107-108). Referring to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Homi Bhabha directly links this unhomely home to a war context: “the cultural confusion wrought by terrible wars and mutual conflicts” leads to the “‘unhomely’ condition of the modern world” (145). While his “‘unhomely’ is a paradigmatic post-colonial experience,” Bhabha acknowledges resonances in other kinds of fictions (142). Thus, the present project also takes into account this differentiation of home into ideal and experience and asks whether there is an underlying unspoiled home ideal in the examined texts: How do these narratives imagine home as desired? A widespread understanding of home in this context is that of a shelter, safe haven, and place of security (e.g., Mallett 70; D. Morley 24), even though in academia this has been challenged as a defining feature of home in general (Mallett 71; Chapman 133). Feminist scholars like Laura Goldsack, for instance, argue: “For women in the home, privacy can mean confinement, captivity and isolation” (121). Examining work on homelessness by Syd Jeffers, David Morley suggests that home is about the control of sheltered space rather than shelter itself (28). Tony Chapman’s observations concerning the identification of the individual with the house as home endorse this view: “[People] hope to create a sphere where they have control over their environment—to mould it to their own needs of comfort and security, style and personal morality” (134). The cracks in the family home

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of Pat Barker’s short story “Subsidence” (2003), originating down below in the ground where the protagonist is unable to reach, elude her control over her own home (chapter 1.). But nowhere is the fear of a loss of control more obvious than in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005), in which the protagonist struggles to keep or regain control over his apparently heavily secured house—and life (chapter 4.1.1.). Nevertheless, the belief that the ideal home is a place of comfort and security is still to be found in popular thinking and thus relevant here. Related to the semantic field of security and shelter is the association of home with privacy and the private (Mallett 71). Privacy, David Morley writes, is understood as “a key feature of home life, enabling family members to live as they please without the scrutiny of others” (29). But noting Walter Benjamin’s observations on bourgeois notions of privacy, David Morley qualifies that such an understanding of home “clearly varies with its context” (29) and claims that ideas of privacy flourish “in a hostile social environment” (29). If this is the case, then war—the very state of hostility—furthers a withdrawal into the secure space of the home, rendering home a conceptual complement of war. In the idea of home, notions of security and the construction of identity intersect. In his article “Spoiled Home Identities,” Chapman argues that identity is bound up with the safe space of the house as home (135). The physical space of the house is turned into an identificatory space of home by shutting out the public, by establishing a spatial and temporal order, and by arranging objects of personal significance to individualise the interior (Chapman 135). The purpose of Chapman’s article is to consider burglary as a prime example for disruptive “live events” that defamiliarise the home and make us aware of—by making strange—what is basic to our idea of self (145-146). The invasion of home by an uninvited and unidentifiable intruder is experienced as deeply unsettling, demonstrating “how the fabric of a house, its internal space and its contents come to embody the self-identity of the people who live there” (Chapman 145). Home emerges as a fragile construct that, when disrupted, immediately calls for the “re-evaluation of the meaning of things and space and … the transformation of the image of home” (Chapman 133, 137). In the present study, war is—albeit on a broader scale—read as another one of these disruptive events which subvert feelings of security as well as the idea of a coherent self and thus initiate processes of reevaluation. While burglary rather affects an individual, a family or, in some cases, a smaller local community, war also impacts national, social, and cultural self-understandings. Special attention will be paid in the analyses of this study to images of intrusion and border crossing, such as burglaries and other transgressions as well as, conversely, lockouts and exclusions. The all-encompassing scope of war requires an understanding of “home as multi-scalar” (Blunt and Dowling 22). Initial associations may refer to a parental home or family dwelling and yet “home is much more than house or household,”

2. Contexts and State of Research

Blunt and Dowling claim (3). One’s rootedness in a family home can be translated to the superordinate level of culture which serves as an anchor point for transindividual identity: “home … can be conceptualized as processes of establishing connections with others and creating a sense of order and belonging as part of rather than separate from society” (Blunt and Dowling 14). As the example of “Subsidence” revealed, links are forged between micro- and macro-levels of home (chapter 1.). Not only the private, individual self is linked to home, but home is located where public and private spaces overlap (Blunt and Dowling 17; also, George 16). As Blunt and Dowling write, “senses of belonging and alienation are constructed across diverse scales ranging from the body and the household to the city, nation and globe” (27; also, Findlay 116). Home can be effective on individual and familial, communal and local, social and cultural, national and international levels. Scholars, such as Sallie A. Marston, investigate such scalar gradations of the social landscape. Arguing from a social theory perspective within the field of human geography, Marston claims that these levels are interrelated and exposes their demarcations as constructed: She speaks, for example, of “scale-making” and its material effect on social structures (221) and discusses “the social construction of space-place tensions” (238). Blunt and Dowling confirm this interdependency at various points in their study Home and highlight the metonymic projection of the micro-home onto the national home: “the characteristics of the nation … can be influenced by processes occurring at the scales of home and household” (29). In other words: “The family home appears as an integral location for imagining the nation as home” (Blunt and Dowling 140). These connections render relevant the individualised war narratives examined here and support their significance beyond the private. In these narratives, spaces of affiliation are set on different levels such as family home, military community, or national belonging. These homes are, in turn, interconnected in specific ways in the narratives even though they span from individual life-worlds to large-scale homeland. And in the analyses, attention will be paid to how the scales of home interact. Home is also a material, geographic place. At least in a general sense, it is located: “Conventionally, in the West a home is, of course, inscribed in the particular physical structure of a house” (D. Morley 19). While this suggests the relevance of architecture to the discussion of home (Mallett 66), other levels of the home-scale implicate the disciplines of urban planning (D. Morley 21-22) and national geography (Blunt and Dowling 2). For the present project, home’s geographical locatedness calls for the examination of spatial structures created in the fictional representations examined. To work out the texts’ individual representation of home, fictional actual space(s), places, and spatial relations will be investigated for their individual, social and cultural significance. What forms these home spaces and how do they work to present a specific image of British culture in the texts? Where is the

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narrative located? Is, for instance, the setting urban, suburban, or rural? Which milieus and neighbourhoods are evoked in the narratives? Yet, home is always more than a spatial location: It is “a meaningful place,” Blunt and Dowling write, a place defined by “how people relate to and experience their dwelling as well as how people create a sense of home in terms of … belonging” (11). Blunt and Dowling introduce home as a “spatial imaginary,” as “a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connect places” (2). Home is at once “material and imaginative,” a spatial structure and a constellation of emotional and cultural associations and ideas; and its meaning unfolds in the connection of these aspects, “as a relation between material and imaginative realms and processes,” Blunt and Dowling state (22). Their notion of home thus links to Soja’s notion of thirdspace, which unifies and exceeds the binary logic of real versus mental space, as Winkler, Seifert, and Detering explain (263). The Wootton Basset example (chapter 1.) shows how real locations gain cultural significance: The airbase, in principle just an infrastructural facility of the military, came to be a “point of entry” for war into the homeland and the town through which the cortèges passed a “surrogate border” (K. Davies 249). Hovering between materiality and meaningmaking, home corresponds with Lotman’s spatial semiotics (chapter 3.1.), which also relates real-life spaces and spatial relations to the meaningful organisation of culture. Furthermore, considering that Wolfgang Iser similarly describes the fictional as “always hovering between the real and the imaginary” (20), George’s observation that “fictionality is an intrinsic attribute of home” (11) brings to attention the proximity of the literary mode and the construction of home. George writes: “The search for the location in which the self is ‘at home’ is one of the primary projects of twentieth century fiction in English” (3). In Twenty-First-Century British Fiction (2015), Rhona Gordon confirms the relevance of home for literature: It goes beyond the nuclear family’s dwelling and home-making practices to interlink political decisionmaking and the characters’ “sense of place in the world” (126). In fiction, George adds, “‘home’ is a desire that is fulfilled or denied in varying measure to the subjects (both the fictional characters and the readers) constructed by the narrative” (2). Though often physically located, home is neither immovable nor static. Blunt and Dowling, for instance, corroborate the “spatial and historical variability of both metaphorical and lived homes” (21). This flexibility is the precondition for the reworking of home into a home/front in the examined narratives. Essentially dynamic, home is subject to negotiation, constantly deconstructed and rebuilt. On a related note, George explains that home is not only dependent on historical situation but also on location and perspective:

2. Contexts and State of Research

Home-country and home resonate differently from different locations for different subjects and often even for the same subject at different locations. And yet while the actual cultural practices change rapidly and dramatically, the desired ideals that such practices are modelled after are much slower to change. (17-18) While George acknowledges the dynamics, she also observes the inherent inertia in the home ideal. Complementary to its continuous mutability, the idea of home possesses a resistance to change. Home thus persists in the tension of its continuities and discontinuities. Constituted by repeatedly performed “home-making practices,” home is persistently confirmed and renegotiated at once (Blunt and Dowling 23). Home has to be ‘kept alive,’ affirmed and maintained, while repetition with variation may reconfigure the concept over the long term. This also places the analytical focus of the present study on the configuration of characters as agents of both home and war. Which protagonists function as representatives of British home culture? And what is their relation to war? Home is also characterised by the character’s position and the hierarchisation of space within the narrative: A character may be located at the cultural core or periphery, move in between, or be placed at the cultural centre in one respect and assume a peripheral role in another. Equally, home is defined by its negations: Homelessness, migration, and other forms of uprootedness and mobility defy the ideas of permanence, belonging, and origin implicit in the term.4 This renders particularly significant the character of the returning soldier as traveller across the border between home and war. This figure will be important for the analyses of the narratives of recent warfare in the coming chapters. It will be crucial to see how returning soldiers modify the spaces they enter and how they are changed in the process themselves. In addition to this, attention will be paid to the motifs of travelling, moving to a new house, homecoming, military deployment, patrols, repatriations of those killed at war, and so on that often challenge ideals of home. In recent years, discussions of home in postcolonial, transnational, and global contexts in works such as Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan’s Postcolonial Geographies (2002) give prominence to “persons living outside of homeland” (Boticello 2). Migrant home spaces rarely feature in the texts examined in the present project, but other transitory “home[s] away from home” (Blunt and Dowling 158) are relevant: Military camps abroad, the soldier’s barracks, makeshift night quarters on patrol as well as getaway holiday spots appear as transient substitutes for home in the war context. Aside from that, characters are relocated more permanently, moving 4

See Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling’s chapter on “Transnational Homes”; Rosemary M. George’s chapter “‘Travelling Light’: Home and the Immigrant Genre”; Liz Kenyon’s “A Home from Home: Students’ Transitional Experience of Home”; and David Morley’s Home Territories, which deals with homelessness (26-30), rootlessness (33-34), mobility as well as migrancy (chapters 2 and 7).

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within the homeland, as in the novel Wish You Were Here (chapter 4.2.) or the television series Homefront (2012) (chapter 6.1.3.), to the effect that home affiliations have to be reconceptualised. The contrastive pair of origin or rootedness versus mobility, both in spatial and notional terms, is relevant to the representation and reconceptualisation of home and self.

2.3.

Home/Front

The term home front, which in general denotes the civilian sphere of belonging of a given country at war,5 implicates a number of paradoxical tensions for the reason that the home ideal as described above stands in opposition to key aspects of what it means to be at war: Home is community, war is opposition; home is a secure space, war is guided by violence; the home is private, war is a state affair; and so on. Because of these semantic as well as historical connotations of the term home front, the home/front of the present project must be differentiated from other uses of the term. In British culture, the idea of a home front refers above all to the World Wars and in particular to “the Home Front myth of the Second World War” (Korte, “Wars” 14). The myth purports an “unprecedented social and moral solidarity” of the British in the face of “total war,” epitomised in the experiences of the Blitz and Dunkirk (Harris 17-18). Considering the famous civilian flotilla disembarking once again to save ‘our’ troops in the 2017 blockbuster Dunkirk, the myth still keeps today (Rodriguez). In reality, Jose Harris notes, neither the distribution of wealth, the industry, nor class or gender roles were revolutionised in the ways the Home Front myth suggests; resistance, discontent, and despondency were very well present in Britain at the time (19). Though television series have, in recent years, touched upon aspects that challenge the image of “the ‘People’s War,’” cultural production in general has kept alive the association of the home front with World War II, “Britain’s ‘good war,’” as Maggie Andrews writes in her contribution to The Home Front in Britain (2014) (235-236). The articles in this volume, edited by Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas, give an outline of established themes of the discourse on the British home front in the World Wars, such as domesticity and work as well as femininities and masculinities. The idea of home/front in this study does not directly relate to such established notions of the term home front. Not only do the realities of historical and present life in Britain differ as to how war interferes with home society; in the present project, the home/front is also located on an abstract, figurative level to present 5

The Oxford English Dictionary defines home front as the “civilian life and population of a country … engaged in military conflict elsewhere, … another front in a consolidated war effort.”

2. Contexts and State of Research

the narrative process of conflating war and home in the examined fictions. And yet, references to previous home front contexts are not entirely without relevance. Still present in cultural memory through popular media or practices of remembering, World War home fronts are explicitly referenced in at least some of the texts this study investigates. In the contemporary context, one understanding of home front is that of domestic, or homegrown terrorism, a problem the UK addresses through CONTEST, the Home Office’s counterterrorist strategy since 2003 (House of Commons 4; also, Chin 22, chapter 7). As a separate issue of the War on Terror, however, domestic terrorism is not a major issue in narratives dealing with the military campaigns. Effectively, Britain is hardly ever presented as a multicultural society in narratives of the recent military campaigns, whereas London River (2009), a film about the 2005 London bombings, emphasises Britain’s cultural diversity. Still, homegrown terrorism may be present as a generalised threat fostering cultural anxieties as, for instance, in the novel Wish You Were Here were the protagonist at one point ponders possible terrorist links to the caravan site he owns (61) (chapter 4.2.). In “The ‘New Home Front’ and the War on Terror,” Gillian Youngs explores in more detail the “multiple dimensions” of the home front in a War on Terror context—only one of these dimensions is domestic terrorism—and their political and ethical implications (925). Another home front is the virtual front created by communications technologies; this is a terrain much harder to control than in older wars, Youngs claims, giving the example of the circulation of the Abu Ghraib pictures (927). Further, Youngs notes how the War on Terror dilutes distinctions between war and home front: Not only do communications technologies dramatically decrease, if not override, the distance of battlefield and homeland regarding the flow of information; the separation of the foreign and the domestic is also obliterated by the simultaneous action against external and internal threats (928, 930). As a last point, Youngs argues that multiculturalism, often bound up with “racialized gender politics,” is a new home front in the War on Terror because it has created an awareness for the cultural diversity of Britain that so far had been “largely taken for granted” (934, 936). Some of these old and new home fronts may be relevant for texts in the corpus of this study on the level of themes and content. The home/front concept at the basis of this study, however, denotes the process of negotiating home in times of contemporary war in narrative fictions of different media. The term home/front is chosen to illustrate how the British cultural home sphere is challenged and affected by the contemporary wars (or fronts) abroad. The term is particularly suited for the purpose of this study because it captures the simultaneously unifying and alienating effects of war on the home. In this study, the home/front term is used to reveal how the fictional material opens up a space to express and think through

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the tensions between home and war spheres. Moreover, the “inextricable links between wars fought at a distance and the multiple connections with home societies” that are expressed in the term home front relate to both macro and micro levels of home, as Youngs writes (926), which are constitutive of the present project’s notion of home as well. The central claim is that fictions of contemporary war in Britain may best be understood if they are read as narrative negotiations of home that transform the sphere of belonging into a home/front. The home/front, as it is used in this study, does not only denote an endpoint or final arrangement that the narratives arrive at. Instead, the term also describes the process of renegotiating home in the face of war on the level of the individual texts, a dynamic narrative self-diagnosis of Britain at war. Taken together, the narratives contribute to the wider cultural process of exploring the signification (and significance) of the complex experiences that constitute these all too recent wars. The term home/front—applied to the narratives—thus covers a diversity of negotiations of Britain at war and marks the point where the different narratives intersect despite all text- and media-specific differences.

3. Theoretical Framework

The terminology of Yuri Lotman’s semiotic model of culture lends itself to describing the notion of a home/front in narratives of contemporary warfare. The semiosphere, modelled on Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s biosphere as the system of “living matter,” conceives of culture as the “semiotic space, outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist” (Lotman, “On the Semiosphere” 208). The sphere of all that is meaningful in culture is separated from an external, foreign, or ‘other’ sphere. In the context of the present study, this structure may be used to describe the opposition of home and war. Moreover, to illustrate the transitional processes of creating a home/front in the examined narratives of recent warfare, which this study reveals, Lotman’s model provides a dynamic mechanism of semiotic exchange across its external and internal boundaries. In recent years, Lotman’s theory has been reexamined for its adaptability to contemporary research and methodology. Susi K. Frank, Cornelia Ruhe, and Alexander Schmitz’s Explosion und Peripherie (2012), for example, looks at two of Lotman’s key terms: the periphery, the place of dynamic cultural exchange within the semiosphere, and explosion, a term Lotman introduced to denote sudden instances of cultural discontinuity, the unpredictable moments of radical overthrow (Vorwort 8; also, Lotman, Culture 7). Though the imagery of explosion seems to suggest itself for a study of narratives of war, Lotman’s notion of explosion presents too bold a concept for the narratives examined here. The semiosphere is the more suitable model for the present context because it includes the mechanics to identify more gradual cultural change (Zenkin 125)—a perspective, Lotman observes, for which the French Annales school’s interest in la longue durée laid the groundwork (Culture 8). Frank, Ruhe, and Schmitz stress that Lotman’s theory is prolific, extensible, and compatible with other concepts and theoretic fields (Vorwort 10). For the purpose of the present study and its focus on narratives of recent warfare, two concepts will be introduced in the following as complements to Lotman’s model: the cultural notion of trauma and Michel Foucault’s heterotopic space. Both are of particular relevance to the examined narratives and provide greater depth for some of the aspects in the analyses.

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3.1.

Yuri Lotman’s Semiosphere

In his writings, Yuri Lotman developed a semiotic theory of culture that led to the introduction and elaboration of the model of the semiosphere. Just as Vernadsky’s biosphere is “the totality and the organic whole of living matter and also the condition for the continuation of life,” the semiosphere is at once the result and precondition of cultural communication and development (Lotman, Universe 125). Lotman describes the semiosphere as an abstract semiotic space in which all “communicative processes and the creation of new information” of a given culture take place (“On the Semiosphere” 207). Apart from the structural applicability of the semiosphere to thesis and argumentation, which will be detailed below, the model’s more general properties also relate to this study’s interests. The semiosphere is a spatial model of culture that links its structural organisation to physical and geographical spaces of culture lived and experienced. And even though the space of the semiosphere “carries an abstract character,” it is not metaphorical, Lotman emphasises (“On the Semiosphere” 207). Like the spatial imaginary of home, culture as conceived in the model of the semiosphere is meaningful space. Moreover, Lotman, literary scholar and semiotician, drafts a model he relates not only to culture in general but to literary and artistic production in particular, underscoring its adaptability to the present context: “The laws of construction of the artistic text,” Lotman argues, “are very largely the laws of the construction of culture as a whole” (Universe 33). For Lotman, a narrative event—the beginning of all narrative action and creation of meaning—is constituted by crossing a semiotic border (Frank 222; also, Kindermann 17-18). In the examined texts, it is the event of war that leads to a transgression of the boundary of home—often in spatial terms as the action moves to the war zone but invariably in terms of moving in between a state of peace or culture and a state of war—and thus initiates narrative action. Lotman’s model provides a common language for the transmedial analyses. In spite of their differences, all media are seen as “clusters of semiotic spaces and their boundaries” within the model (Lotman, Universe 123-124). The semiosphere assumes a shared topological basis for all texts produced by a given culture and is composed to work out the meaningful spatial relations of culture independent of the concrete form of the topographically specific text (Frank 221-222). The model implies a substantial, transtextual coherence of cultural production and thus encompasses all media texts investigated here—although, using their own specific codes and forming distinct sign systems,1 they take different perspectives on the cultural sphere. 1

Yuri Lotman’s examples refer to sign systems beyond natural language, such as artistic genres (Universe 134) and conceptions of self in the tsar era (“On the Semiosphere” 209).

3. Theoretical Framework

The central aspects and arguments of the present project correspond to key features of the semiosphere: Just as this study assumes a basic (if conceptual or imagined) separation between home and war, Lotman’s “rough primary distinction” is that created by the boundary separating culture from the nonsemiotic exterior (Universe 138). “Every culture,” Lotman notes in Universe of the Mind (1990), “begins by dividing the world into ‘its own’ internal space and ‘their’ external space” (131). Culture, as presented by the semiosphere, appears as a unified space of “‘ours’, ‘my own,’” as a secure and “harmoniously organized” sphere set against an exterior sphere of hostility, danger, and chaos (Lotman, Universe 131). This basic opposition has an identificatory function: “there can be no ‘us’ if there is no ‘them,’” Lotman explains (Universe 142). And Daniele Monticelli confirms that “self-description functions as a mechanism of exclusion”; information that cannot be translated is neglected and the unintelligible is expelled from the cultural sphere (66-67). The boundary of the semiosphere thus has a subject-creating function; what constitutes a subject in one culture may fail to determine personality in another (Lotman, Universe 138). When characters in the examined narratives of war cross semiotic boundaries, such as the figure of the returning soldier, and move from one sphere into another, this movement may have a profound effect on their identity. A combatant, confident and thriving in the theatre of war, may turn into an isolated and psychologically challenged misfit at home, such as Danny in the television series Occupation (chapter 6.2.). Lotman’s own examples for the boundary’s subject-creating function are concerned with the mutual incomprehensibility of individual and collective identities (Universe 139). In texts including a military setting with its specific dynamics, for instance, tensions may appear between domestic and military identities due to the conflicting semiotic delineation of these spheres of belonging. The relation between internal and external sphere in Lotman’s model is one of symmetry, juxtaposing cultures on an equal footing (Frank, Ruhe, and Schmitz, Vorwort 10).2 In the present study, however, the crucial opposition is not the confrontation of British with either the Afghan or the Iraqi culture, even though both constellations may occasionally become relevant. For the overall argument of this project, the important juxtaposition is that of British home culture with an extraneous sphere or culture of war. And the analyses of novel, drama, and film narratives will be interested in what determines the separation of home and war and examine how the configuration of the foreign sphere of war characterises home and vice versa.

2

This symmetry has been criticised for excluding imperial and colonial situations, where asymmetrical power relations interfere with cultural exchange (Frank, Ruhe, and Schmitz, Vorwort 10). For Renata Makarska, equal communication is impossible in these constellations and attempts of the dominant culture to assimilate the other the rule (319, 308).

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Still, the division into interior and exterior space is only the schematic starting point for Lotman, Michael C. Frank stresses (222). Beyond this basic structure, the model is elaborated and differentiated to draw a more complex picture of the cultural sphere and its communicative processes. First of all, the juxtaposition of semiotic and extrasemiotic space is not an essential or fixed opposition. The semiosphere is a relational space: It takes a specific perspective on culture which determines the position and course of the defining boundary. For Lotman, “the crossing point of the boundary of a given culture depends on the position of the observer” (“On the Semiosphere” 213). In other words, the unity of semiotic space is primarily constituted by a unified relation to the boundary (Lotman, Innenwelt 173).3 In the present study, this perspective is always conceived as British—even if the individual texts in effect entertain very different ideas of the character of this British point of view. In addition to the spatial relationality, the semiosphere always has a specific position in terms of time: It is not a diachronically fixed actuality but a “synchronic semiotic space” (Lotman, Universe 3). That is to say, the semiosphere always represents culture at a specific historical point in time. If in contrast to nonsemiotic space the semiosphere appears uniform, its internal organisation is in fact asymmetrical and heterogeneous (Lotman, Universe 125, 128). According to Lotman, “a law of the internal organisation of the semiosphere” is the marked incline between centre and periphery (“On the Semiosphere” 214), creating an imbalance of power between the core and the cultural margins (Frank 241). The centre standardises cultural identity and implements the “identitarian separation” of culture by defining the rules of exclusion (Monticelli 66). In other words, the centre regulates the “list of what ‘does not exist’” (Lotman, Universe 129). On the highest level of structural organisation—cultural self-description—culture is presented as homogenous, even as the norm set at the centre inevitably clashes with the multifaceted semiotic reality of the periphery (Lotman, Universe 129). A clear demarcation of the boundary is, in any case, possible only from the perspective of the unifying centre (Frank 241). Any natural essence of culture is a “mythological image” or “ideological self-portrait” that reduces a lived plurality to an imagined uniformity, Monticelli explains (66). Peeter Selg and Andreas Ventsel, who apply Lotman’s model to theories of political power, acknowledge such “identity formation … as an ordering principle of cultural reality” (47). Selg and Ventsel argue that cultural identity must be reaffirmed whenever the system comes under pressure, for instance, by “direct dangers of war,” by increased contact with foreign cultures, or the introduction of new media (47). If this is the case, the appearance of war in the home spheres presented in narratives of recent warfare would indeed lead to

3

The English translation, Universe of the Mind, omits this detail and ascribes the unifying function to the boundary itself (130).

3. Theoretical Framework

a reevaluation of the identificatory narratives of British home culture to reconcile the conflicting experience of war with the cultural self-image. In contrast to the centre’s neat demarcation of culture from an allegedly disorganised nonsemiotic exterior, heterogeneity is in fact the ruling principle of the semiosphere (Lotman, Universe 125). The centre may be the place of stabilisation and the location of its highest degree of organisation, but here the system also “loses its inner reserves of indeterminacy which provide it with flexibility, heightened capacity for information and the potential for dynamic development,” Lotman explains (Universe 128; also, Schorno 26). The semiosphere depends both on a stable core and an active periphery; they are at once hierarchically organised and interdependent (Koschorke 30). Just like the living biosphere, the semiosphere needs dynamic elements to avoid stasis and ensure its continued existence; and the vital semiotic activity concentrates in the multilingual, polysemous periphery where the marginalised elements of culture assemble (Lotman, Universe 130). In this diffuse transitional space (Frank 229), the multifaceted reality of culture unfolds (E. Andrews 176). Further away from the centre, semiotic processes become less unified and predictable (Frank, Ruhe, and Schmitz, Vorwort 10), rendering meaning-making processes more open and vibrant (Lotman, “On the Semiosphere” 212). In the cultural periphery, Monticelli specifies, rest the “emancipative capacity” and cultural “reserve of indeterminacy and polyglotism” that may challenge the unifying narrative of identity coined at the centre (74). The introduction of centre and periphery is not the only stratification of the semiospheric interior. Internal boundaries on different levels and of different permeability structure the semiosphere and constitute a complex pattern of “subsemiospheres”; this “multi-level system” is encompassed by the semiosphere as the “metastructural space” (Lotman, Universe 138). For the purpose of the present project, the system of sub-semiospheres and the drawing of internal boundaries may illustrate not only the scalar gradations of home but also transtextual and transmedial differences. Though taking into account internal asymmetry and heterogeneity and the semiosphere’s relational character, the model’s basic spatial structure is characterised by demarcation and opposition. Early drafts of Lotman’s cultural theory have therefore been criticised as static and inflexible (Gretchko 81). The semiosphere’s dynamic character only becomes obvious when processes of exchange at the margins take on greater significance later on: The emphasis on the delimiting function of the boundary gives way to a focus on its permeability and capacity to facilitate cultural exchange (Frank, Ruhe, and Schmitz, Vorwort 10). The boundary comes to occupy “the most important functional and structural position” of the semiosphere, Lotman writes (“On the Semiosphere” 210). The function of the boundary is ambivalent—“it both separates and unites” (Lotman, Universe 136). The boundary is thus not a one-dimensional separation line but emerges as an ad-

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justable space of transition that controls the flow of information between internal and external space (Lotman, Universe 140). This border space is the cultural ‘hot spot’ of semiosis: Here, external codes and information enter the semiotic space to be translated into the language of the semiosphere and thus acquire meaning (Lotman, Universe 136-137). From this perspective, the boundary appears as a “unique unit of translation” (Frank 211) constituted by the “bilingual translatable ‘filters’” at work in the communication processes with external space (Lotman, “On the Semiosphere” 208). Or rather, as “a bilingual mechanism” the boundary enables communication between semiotic and nonsemiotic space in the first place (Lotman, “On the Semiosphere” 210). The boundary thus represents “the essence of the semiotic process” (E. Andrews 176) and takes on a vital mediating role within the model of the semiosphere (Gretchko 85). Natural languages are often Lotman’s prime example, but processes of translation can in principle occur between any two sign systems. Translation is never a straightforward one-on-one transmission, some transformation of the information must and will take place. As foreign texts are integrated into the “internal semiotics” of the semiosphere, new meaning is introduced because the texts always retain some of “their own characteristics” (Lotman, Universe 137). That is to say that new meaning is generated through the disparity or asymmetry of signifying systems, namely at the point where their codes are “mutually untranslatable” and yet “mutually interprojected” (Lotman, Universe 3). The resulting indeterminacy leads to “a constant need for choice” to find equivalents for the external information within one’s own signifying system (Lotman, Universe 14-15)—a choice that impacts on the level of meaning. Hence, correlations, analogies, and correspondences that interlink home and war spheres are of special interest in the upcoming analyses. Moreover, what occurs in terms of translation at the border of the semiosphere is not a one-way transmission of the message but always a bidirectional transmutation: In the processes of translation within the examined narratives of recent warfare, for example, war is interpreted as a British experience only to modify British culture and self-conception in turn. Similarly, “[i]nnovation comes about” when processes of translation occur along the internal boundaries of semiotic space (Lotman, Universe 137). Across the semiosphere, Lotman observes, “the process of generating new information thereby snowballs” (Universe 140). This ultimately opens up the model for complex internal interaction and communication. In the processes of translation across internal boundaries—whose number is limited only by the number of perspectives or positions that, as explained above, create these boundaries—subspaces exchange information. Accepted codes are confirmed or rejected, and new meanings are tested and either discarded or integrated, leading to a gradual but constant process of cultural change.

3. Theoretical Framework

Crucial for the following analyses is the fact that boundaries can manifest as actual spaces and physical structures (Lotman, Universe 140), such as doors, thresholds, landmarks, waterways, or transitional and moving spaces like airports, service stations, and ferries. For Lotman, the semiotic ordering of culture is represented in the organisation of physical space: “Less valued social groups are settled on the periphery,” for instance (Universe 140). There are also temporal boundaries within the semiosphere: Night, for example, gives physical space a new—if transitional—character distinct from what the location signifies at daytime (Lotman, Universe 141). For the analyses in this study, not only momentary states and fixed positions are relevant; routes and lines of movement are also of particular significance for narrative development and eventfulness within the narratives. Lotman explicates in The Structure of the Artistic Text (1970) how the hero-agent’s transgression of boundaries creates “a decisive, unpredictable turn in the narrated happenings, a deviation from the normal, expected course of things” which brings the narrative forward (Hühn, “Event” par. 3; par. 29). Such significant transgressions of boundaries are captured in the transitions from and into nonsemiotic space as well as in the exchange across internal borders. According to Lotman’s semiotic infrastructure (Schorno 32), the artistic text “oscillates” between two forms of translational operations or “communication channels”: outward and inward. The latter describes autocommunicative processes in which sender and recipient are one and the same (Lotman, Universe 33, 29, 21). This sender-recipient can be anything from the individual (text) to culture itself (Schorno 29). What occurs in these self-involved communications is not a quantitative addition of information as in the translations between semiosphere and extrasemiotic space but a qualitative transformation of old information which can also create new meaning and may lead to a remodelling of self (Lotman, Universe 22). Next to this inventive function of revaluing and transforming information, autocommunication can also have a mnemonic function, that is, keeping a message alive within the semiosphere, Christian Schorno explains (29). While external communication implies a spatial transmission of information from one (sub)sphere to another, autocommunication is an exchange of information over time: The “‘I-I’ system” of communication describes an exchange between former and future self and, in its mnemonic function, tests whether the codes of the former self still apply at the present time (Schorno 29-30). What is crucial in the case of inventive autocommunication is that it is initiated “by the intrusion of supplementary codes from outside, and by external stimuli” that recontextualise the message (Lotman, Universe 22). Providing occasion but not content for a reevaluation of the information, such codes are especially present in the polyvalent, reflexive form of artistic representation (Schorno 28). The material investigated in the present study is certainly not avant-garde, the poetic form most radically autocommunicative and polyvalent (Schorno 32). But the theme of war

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that the examined texts share may provide such an element of intrusion or external stimulus: War, interfering within the home sphere, may work as a nonsemiotic trigger that reorganises meaning through the use of syntagmatic structures (Lotman, Universe 28). Syntagmatic codes such as rhythm, repetition, and ornamentation, Lotman argues, serve to restructure a message already known (Universe 25). In the context of the present study, the established narrative of British home culture may be reshaped by the unintelligible or meaningless experience of war and the disillusion and feeling of empty repetition the examined narratives often convey. According to Schorno, Lotman speaks of a superimposition of the supplementary external code on the actual message (31). Again, the model provides a structure applicable to the analysis of the narratives later on in this study: The examined texts superimpose the pattern of war on the home. The aim is to show that, on a general level, the examined novels, plays, and films constitute self-oriented messages of British culture. That is, the invasions explored in these narratives do not represent the confrontation with real-life cultures—whether Afghan, Iraqi, or any other. Instead, in the texts, the British home sphere is opposed with a more abstract idea of war as something that signifies a contrast to what it means to be British. The semiospheric operations Lotman’s model offers are, in themselves, valuefree. It is the application to a given culture that adds judgement. Relevant for the present project is thus also the cultural discourse on trauma, which gives value and weight to the claim of an imagined invasion of war into the British home sphere. The significance of trauma is based on the fact that notions of trauma permeate modern Western thinking at large (Kaplan 24; also, Breslau 113) and contexts of war more particularly (Leys 4).

3.2.

Cultural Notions of Trauma

The discourse on trauma and trauma representation informs many of the narratives examined here. And the motif of trauma appears in texts from all three of the selected media. One reason for this prominence is that present-day notions of trauma have been shaped substantially by war contexts. The most widely received understanding of trauma today, the American Psychiatric Association’s medico-legal specification of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), first issued in 1980, has been developed in the aftermath of armed conflict in Vietnam and has been constantly revised since then (Luckhurst, The Trauma 59-61). But traumatic phenomena were known and examined long before the term trauma was adopted in psychological diagnostics. In The Trauma Question, Roger Luckhurst explains that the concept of trauma draws back on older discussions and concepts such as hysteria and the family history of insanity in psychoanalytic theory (8, 56). Since the late nineteenth century, the cultural and scientific conceptualisation of trauma has undergone dra-

3. Theoretical Framework

matic change. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the industrial scale of World War I and military psychology formed the concept of trauma to include ideas of memory loss and a specific temporal logic (Luckhurst, The Trauma 4, 53). Closely linked to the traumatic symptomatology of shell shock, the First World War has since become the epitome of a traumatic event (Luckhurst, The Trauma 51).4 Today, the most influential discussion of trauma beyond medical definitions is that of literary scholar Cathy Caruth, whose work in the mid-1990s revived the discussion of cultural notions of trauma. Trauma, literally a wound, is commonly perceived as “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event” that provokes physical and mental symptoms like hallucinations, dreams, and repetitive and aggressive behaviour (Caruth 4). This common notion of trauma captures the idea of an external event influencing the perception and behaviour of the traumatised. Caruth, however, locates trauma “solely in the structure of its experience or reception,” that is, in the belated and repetitive transformation of the experience of the traumatic event into an accessible memory of the traumatised (4). Luckhurst specifies that trauma denotes “a piercing or breach of a border,” disrupting the relation between mental and physical reality (The Trauma 3). Trauma as a “breach of a border” is structurally analogous to ideas inherent in Lotman’s model of the semiosphere: An inside and an outside engage in a process of exchange that is based on the transgression of borders of signification to create links between the two systems. Structures of trauma are closely connected to the imagery of this project’s thesis—the idea of an invasion of the reality of war into the home sphere. Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace, writing about psychoanalyst Colette Soler’s idea of trauma, emphasise this quality of the traumatic experience: “Trauma … is an excess of the Real, an irruption of the Real, an invasion by images, noises and sensations impossible to endure, impossible to assimilate (and also impossible to avoid)” (76). Trauma thus may present the invasion of war in the examined texts as a moment that subjects the individual to the traumatic experience, rendering vulnerable the traumatised—and by extension the culture he or she represents. Tracing the discussion in the wake of Caruth, Luckhurst describes trauma as an “aporia, or unresolvable paradox,” as an “unusual memory registration” erasing the most traumatic information from consciousness; marked by a “strange temporality,” trauma defers the experience of the traumatic event until it reappears, suddenly and unbidden (The Trauma 4-5). In literature or, more generally, in representation, trauma confounds notions “of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time” (Luckhurst, The Trauma 5). That is not to say that trauma is absent from cultural representation. For instance, media reporting on 9/11 consisted of a loop of images that “imitate[d] the repetitive pattern of the traumatised mind,” 4

For a detailed discussion of the aetiology and conceptual history of trauma, see the first chapter of Roger Luckhurst’s The Trauma Question (2008), “The Genealogy of a Concept.”

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Derek Paget notes (12). For Caruth, then, the traumatic “image or event” rather gains a haunting quality (4-5); its embodied figure, the ghost, is a central image for literary representations of psychic trauma. In “Seeing Ghosts: Theorizing Haunting in Literary Texts,” Tiina Kirss writes: “What haunts is not subject to conscious memory: unbidden, it comes back for visits, and recurs through uncanny phenomena, personified or atmospheric” (21). Interestingly, Kirss describes haunting as a recurrence and thus interlinks the idea of trauma with the motif of return that is present in many of the examined narratives of contemporary war. Cultural and literary as well as medico-legal definitions of trauma attest to the link between trauma and a challenge to the conception of self, based on the premise that “trauma disrupts memory, and therefore identity” (Luckhurst, The Trauma 1). This correlation of trauma and identity is present in definitions of trauma across the disciplines: “Trauma has become a paradigm because it has been turned into a repertoire of compelling stories about the enigmas of identity, memory and selfhood that have saturated Western life,” Luckhurst writes (The Trauma 80). Similarly, in his multidisciplinary monograph Memory, War and Trauma, Nigel C. Hunt explains: “The traumatic event makes a person re-evaluate his or her life; that person tends to reflect on the traumatic event…. Through this, fundamental change relating to the self can occur” (83). Trauma, as Hunt describes it, may be used as a literary trope to convey the idea of a reworking of personal and cultural images of self. This interconnection of traumatic experience and identity is one aspect that renders the concept of trauma relevant for the present study, which looks at the experience of war as a challenge to cultural notions of home and self. Just as Lotman’s semiotic model of culture envisions the creation of newly meaningful connections, trauma research envisions coping strategies to render meaningful the unresolved traumatic experience. Cultural and therapeutic approaches to overcome trauma, including ideas of ‘posttraumatic growth,’5 make use of the capacity of narrative to create meaning. Because narrative may restructure fragmented traumatic memory into newly meaningful patterns, coping strategies as well as treatment approaches frequently rely on storytelling principles (Hunt 78-79). There is a belief in both psychoanalysis and literature as “particularly privileged forms of writing” to deal with the aporia of trauma (Luckhurst, The Trauma 5). Luckhurst, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, stresses that “narrative is an act of concordance,” an operation that creates coherence and unity and has the power to rearrange the chaotic experience of trauma in a comprehensible order (The Trauma 84). On a larger scale, narrative fiction contributes to the

5

Psychologists Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi coined the term in 1995 (“The Foundations” 3). The Encyclopedia of Psychological Trauma explains that “[p]osttraumatic growth refers to the constellation of positive changes that people may experience following exposure to psychological trauma” (Linley and Joseph 481); also, Nigel S. Hunt 89-91.

3. Theoretical Framework

negotiation of “events of an extreme and traumatic nature” not least by providing insights into experiential and emotional aspects (Kurvet-Käosaar 317). The novel, in particular, is conceived as “an important site for configuring (and therefore refiguring) traumatic impacts for the wider culture” (Luckhurst, The Trauma 87). At length, literature has been concerned with “stories of growth,” with “positive outcomes” of trauma through storytelling (Hunt 82). In the contemporary war context, notions of trauma as pathology are frequently connected to constructions of the home front: The returning soldier, traumatised by his or her experience abroad, carries war across the boundary of home into the cultural sphere. Martin Barker’s discussion of representations of PTSD in A ‘Toxic Genre,’ which is tellingly subheaded “Bringing the War Home,” reveals much about the covert politics behind PTSD and comments on the contestability of this term that “shifts uneasily between being a medical category, a legal manoeuvre and a fictional explanatory device” (83). Martin Barker directs attention and objects to “the way [PTSD] depoliticises [soldiers’] reactions to war” (86). Trauma, Barker argues, is used as a “convenient metaphor” with a “self-justifying,” self-victimising, self-pitying function, which seeks to explain and pardon the misdemeanour of ‘our’ troops and the role ‘we’ played in the Iraq War (89-99). In this sense, notions of PTSD and trauma more generally can be used to intervene in and impact on the cultural self-image. Though trauma does not exhaust the narrative rendering of an invasion of war at home in the examined material, it stands out as one of the principal images representing the invasion of war into the British home sphere.

3.3.

Michel Foucault’s Heterotopia

A second concept that is helpful to understand the negotiation of home in fictions of contemporary war is Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopic or “absolutely other” space (332). Heterotopias are “real and effective spaces” in which the conditions of society are at once “represented, challenged, and overturned” (Foucault 332). Like the notion of trauma, the concept can be linked to Lotman’s model of the semiosphere. The invasion of war into the home in the examined texts may be captured by Lotman’s model, but in combination with Foucault’s heterotopic space this invasion is further qualified: The presence of war renders home alien and unfamiliar and turns it into an ‘absolutely other’ home/front. Foucault writes that “there is probably not a single culture in the world that is not made up of heterotopias” (332). Consequently, the use of heterotopic spaces and places is not specific to fictions of recent war. Nevertheless, heterotopic places and space serve to capture the defamiliarising effect of war and the suspension of a former, idealised home in several of the narratives considered here. The narrative digressions to heterotopic

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settings give specific expression to the challenged state of home in the face of war in the examined texts. Like Lotman’s spatial model, Foucault’s notion of space relies on relationality: “[We live] in a set of relationships that define positions which cannot be equated or in any way superimposed” (331). Heterotopic space is, according to Foucault, “a sort of counter arrangement, of effectively realized utopia”; it “lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable” (332). Heterotopias simultaneously resemble the world we live in and are distinct from it. Like an—actually existing—mirror image, the heterotopia refers the ‘I’ back to itself by inverting and overturning its known arrangements, Foucault claims (332). In heterotopic space, one feels to be “the proprietor of the very opposite thing” of one’s own space of belonging, as the protagonist of Wish You Were Here puts it (29) (chapter 4.2.). On this account, the concept of heterotopia is productive in the analysis of contemporary war narratives that renegotiate the British self-image confounded in the face of war. There is a great diversity of heterotopic spaces in any given society, but spaces of deviance prevail today, that is, places where aberrations and differences from the norm of society are contained—such as prisons, psychiatric clinics, and nursing homes (Foucault 333). These places are created on the outside of society (Foucault 332), a dynamic that resembles the displacement of some aspects of culture from the core to the periphery in Lotman’s model of the semiosphere. There are, however, also less dismal heterotopias such as the fun fair. In the fictions examined in the present study, holiday space and places, for instance, appear frequently—perhaps because as a place of leisure and recreation they provide a stark contrast to the violent reality of the battlefield that looms in the background of the narratives. The holiday arrangement reproduces home constellations on a small or idealised scale: A temporary or, indeed, atemporal idyllic home is simulated, a simpler version of everyday life (Foucault 335). On the other hand, heterotopias have “the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other,” such as the theatrical space of the stage (Foucault 334). It is this polyvalent dimension of heterotopic space which makes it particularly productive in semiotic terms. Against the combined backdrop of Lotman’s model of the semiosphere, the cultural notion of trauma, and Foucault’s heterotopia, the narratives of contemporary war will be analysed in the following chapters. These theoretical concepts provide the framework to investigate the fictional representation of recent warfare as narrative experiences of invasion into and disruptions of the British home sphere. In the narratives, notions of self and belonging are examined to reimagine home as a home/front marked by the experience and repercussions of extended warfare abroad.

4. Novel

In 2012, journalist Bryan Appleyard blogs that despite the long tradition of the theme of war in Western literature “the big new British war novels have not yet appeared.” Literary scholar Roger Luckhurst shares the position that the recent wars have not generated a concise literary reaction and argues that, in fiction, the Iraq War is mainly treated indirectly (“In War Times” 713, 715). On closer inspection, British novelists have not been as negligent of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars as such comments suggest. Soon after the conflicts arose in the early 2000s, writers began to tell stories of British life set against the backdrop of contemporary war. More than a decade later, a small corpus of novels by Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, and others has accrued. But readers and critics have rarely conceived of these texts as a connected group of works. Surveys such as Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson’s The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (2015) include novels such as McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Pat Barker’s Double Vision (2003), but they do not present them as a delimitable strand of writing on war.

4.1.

Exploration: New Home/Fronts in British Prose Fiction

The present chapter acknowledges these novels as negotiations of the British experience of contemporary war. The claim here is not that there is the new British war novel. But proceeding from a thematic common ground, these texts show recurring concerns that contribute to the cultural perspective on the recent conflicts. First and foremost, in response to the contemporary experience of war, the examined novels renegotiate the British sphere of belonging. Within the transmedial field of this study, the novel offers some of the most reflexive perspectives on the war experience. Independent of the performative and audiovisual modes discussed in later chapters and drawing on the novel’s aptitude to simulate interior perspective and individuality (Korte, “Being” 435), the prose texts create specific imaginary spaces to explore British home culture under the impact of the conflicts waged abroad.

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The novel today encompasses a great diversity of styles, concerns, attitudes, and genres. Historically speaking, though, novelistic narration reflects specific concerns of modernity. In an alienating context of urbanisation, mass media, acceleration of transport, and the exploration of the unconscious, the fictionality and imaginary scope of the novel accompanied and contributed to the development of a modern mentality (Vietta 11; Bauer 4-5). The novel gives expression to a bourgeois interiority in conflict with the modern world: The perceptions and views of a discerning, remembering, feeling, and reflecting subject constitute the reality of the novel and form its structure of space and time (Vietta 15-16, 24, 30; also, Bauer 7). Though this reality relates to a realist, everyday context (MacKay 3), it does not deal with a physical, actual, objective world directly but with subjective perspectives and perceptions that bring forth a world of reflexion, imagination, emotion, memory, and apprehension. Various models and theories seek to capture the range and complexity of narrative perspective and the narrator. And though drama and film may use narrator figures, the narrator is at home in prose fiction and its most established long form, the novel. The concept of focalisation, which separates narrative voice and point of view (Niederhoff par. 27), stresses the relevance of perspective and character construction for the novel more generally (MacKay 64-65). Moreover, in the reading process, readers add their own subjective perspective to the formation of the narrated world (Vietta 32). Accordingly, novels on contemporary war may work from what constitutes the lowest level of home in the present study: the individual consciousness. In fact, providing an “intimate view … into characters’ heads” as well as “critical distance,” the novel is, for Krista Kauffmann, “a uniquely suitable forum” to explore issues of war that require empathy while dealing with instances of violence (96). Though the examined texts are diverse in terms of form, style, and depth of engagement with the topic of war, they may be brought together for their intimate and reflexive perspectives on the British home at war. At times, popular fiction in the UK casually acknowledges the influence of recent warfare on British life and culture. In Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike novel The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), for instance, the protagonist is introduced as physically and mentally affected by his service in Afghanistan—what is hardly affected by war, however, is the development of the novel’s crime narrative. A more profound interest in the impact and repercussions of war today characterises the novels examined in this chapter. For reasons of comparability and for a meaningful and manageable selection of works, the corpus is limited to texts with a contemporary setting and a reference to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq on the story level, including the prewar decision-making process, antiwar protest, and combat operations as well as traumatic effects and remembrance. Merely figurative representations are excluded. In all texts, war is more than circumstantial detail: War has a distinct impact in the narrative. Apart

4. Novel

from their British authorship, the novels are concerned with British protagonists and a British perspective on the story world. Published between 2003 and 2015, the examined novels cover more than a decade of contemporary writing. They sound out the direct and indirect impact of war on contemporary British life, on military as well as civilian home spheres, and explore stories of active engagement as well as more passive affectedness and intellectual reflexion. With the exceptions of Double Vision (2003) and James Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008), earlier novels usually address the more contentious conflict in Iraq, even though the deployment of troops to Afghanistan preceded the invasion of Baghdad. Only as Britain withdraws combat troops from Basra in 2009, the conflict in Afghanistan supersedes the Iraq War as a literary topic. Some of the novels on these two conflicts also refer to British military operations before 2001, such as missions in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, the Falklands and, most frequently, the two World Wars. Not all of the novels can be analysed in detail. After a look at the state of academic research, the corpus will be introduced and explored to mark off the field and identify trends and common concerns; in exemplary analyses, the variety of home/fronts created in novels on contemporary war is examined. These provide the context for the following close reading of Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here, a text chosen for its intricate entanglement of home and war. Thus, the present chapter shows the diversity of narratives on contemporary war in the novel that deal with a modified home sphere and demonstrates the complexity of strategies to write war into the contemporary British experience.

State of Research So far, novels on the recent wars do not form a concise group of works in research. While some of the novels, such as Wish You Were Here (2011) and Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005), have been studied in other contexts, many have acquired but a small readership and little critique. Literary scholarship concerned with military warfare rather turns to older wars, such as Patrick Deer’s Culture in Camouflage (2009), a survey dealing with literature of the two World Wars, or Carine Berbéri and Monia O’Brien Castro’s 30 Years After (2015), which addresses the Falklands War. The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (2012), edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson, even deliberately excludes the wars of the twenty-first century “for that story is still being written and told” (Introduction 3). Surveys may briefly refer to recent wars, like Kate McLoughlin’s The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009) in its chapter on “The Cold War and the ‘War on Terror’” (Pascoe 246). Still, comprehensive readings of British novels on war in Afghanistan and Iraq have not yet emerged.

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It has been suggested that temporal proximity to a historical event affects its fictional representation (Bentley, Hubble, and Wilson, “Fiction” 8). Martin Randall notes in 9/11 and the Literature of Terror that “it takes time for individuals and communities fully to understand the importance of any given public event” (2). In line with this, Luckhurst assesses literature on the Iraq War as follows: Within ten years, we already have a clear idea of a certain canon of texts that enable familiar debates about the ethics and aesthetics of the representation of the catastrophe [of 9/11]. One cannot say quite the same for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that followed as a far from logical consequence of 9/11. No defining literary texts have emerged from the overlapping contexts of the invasion, the Iraqi civil war, or the occupation. Perhaps symptomatically, it isn’t yet clear how we should name, periodize, or even characterize these events. (“In War Times” 713-714; also, “Not Now” 51) For Luckhurst, the Iraq War is indeterminate, and the intangibility of contemporary war is aggravated because Iraq and Afghanistan both continue to be places of unrest. This lack of closure interferes with the narrativisation of the conflicts whereas the “highly readable event” of 9/11 invites artistic representation (Luckhurst, “In War Times” 721). For Geoff Dyer, however, it is not temporal proximity that puts the contemporary novel on hold; “first-rate” storytelling on war is simply to be found elsewhere, namely in nonfiction. Kate McLoughlin also suggests that the “natural form” to narrate these wars is the blog, not the novel (Authoring 10). But such claims of a shortcoming in representing contemporary war rather supports the examination of novels that nevertheless explore the wars as part of the contemporary experience. Other than in isolated instances, academics have so far studied the novels by Barker, McEwan, Ali Smith, and Swift only. Much of the critique prioritises the theme of terrorism over that of war and reads novels like McEwan’s Saturday as 9/11 literature. In this context, British fiction is often part of international corpora, as in Tim Gauthier’s 9/11 Fiction, Empathy and Otherness (2015) or Kristine A. Miller’s Transatlantic Literature and Culture After 9/11 (2014). Global contexts are important for UK writing on contemporary war (Gupta 16; Bentley, Hubble, and Wilson, “Fiction” 22), but the novels also reflect specific British contexts, such as the history of warfare, military and remembrance culture, the Special Relationship, or the contrast of rural and urban homes. Some 9/11 research discusses notions of home, such as the entanglement of the domestic and the global (C. Morley 717). In Fictions of the War on Terror (2015), Daniel O’Gorman writes about home and exile in US Iraq War novels1 and notes

1

His British example, Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2011), also focusses on a US setting.

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how characters reveal a “damaged sense of self” by moving between home and external world—never belonging, never “whole” (100-101). Research on contemporary war in British novels in particular is scarce. Closest to the present chapter comes perhaps Suman Gupta’s chapter on fiction in Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion (2011), though it does not take an exclusively British perspective or looks at texts beyond 2005. Interestingly, Gupta takes some pains to justify the Iraq War as a literary research focus independent of 9/11. Not unlike Luckhurst, Gupta claims that the terrorist attack is radically different from the preconceived military campaigns “without any kind of narrative closure” (28-29). Home is not Gupta’s main concern but at times his argument is not far off: “[The idea of the reality of war] interfered with the unthinking sense of normality and everyday life,” he writes (28). Thinking about war in literature reveals what went unnoticed before. Blocking “the smooth flow” of life (Gupta 28), war creates dissonances and thus the need to rethink everyday life and culture. “Novels and plays,” Gupta adds, “often register the invasion as an eruption of the idea that the invasion is really happening in the midst of families and lovers and friends going about their daily lives” (30). Gupta is aware that in fiction on contemporary war the boundaries of home are challenged.

4.1.1.

Urban Protest: The Run-Up to War

In his section on literary fiction of the Iraq War, Gupta includes a reading of McEwan’s Saturday, a novel set in the context of the run-up to the Iraq War and the massive antiwar protests in February 2003. It is the most noted text within a small group of works that focus on the prewar phase. Alison Miller’s Demo (2005), for instance, introduces a group of young protesters involved in antiglobalisation and antiwar activism. The novel captures “the mood of anti-capitalist discontent in the naughties,” making a special note of its Scottish context (Bissett 65). The shifting intimate relationships and adolescent first experiences, often abusive and disconcerting, within the group are set in the context of large-scale protest marches in Florence and the home town of Glasgow. In Demo, the rallies figure as rhapsodic happenings, as manifestations of an unquestionably dedicated but not always particularly focussed attitude towards the respective political issues. The affluent middle-class focaliser of Saturday, on the other hand, watches with scepticism the euphoric antiwar masses that gather in his home town London (Groes 111). The novels have the same temporal distance to the actual events but take very different perspectives. Saturday’s protagonist takes an outsider’s point of view and, in his mind, probes the opposition towards the prowar voices. Demo may highlight the naivety and often anything but political intentions of the young activists, but it provides insight into the emotional lives of the protesters and allows empathetic engagement on the part of the reader.

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Other novels mention the protests in passing, such as Joan Bakewell’s All the Nice Girls (2009). In The Accidental, the antiwar rally again appears as a field for adolescent first experiences in politics, though not as detailed as in Demo. Melissa Benn’s One of Us (2008) deals with political protest more generally. Here, war is a matter of conscience, a moment to take a stand regardless of private loyalties. In the frame narrative, set in March 2003, Anna Adams tells a journalist how, over the last thirty years, her family came to be closely linked to the political action that leads Britain into war with Iraq. In 1971, as US protests against war in Vietnam foreshadow the British reality of 2003, her family befriends the family of Andy Givings. The friendship takes a turn when Andy decides to go into politics. Anna’s family supports him; her brother Matt manages his campaign. Only misfit Jack opposes Andy’s political beliefs in “contemptuous, idealistic, increasingly drastic” ways (Abrams). But when Andy takes Tony Blair’s side on the issue of Iraq, the rest of the family also renounce their allegiance to him. In the end, Jack’s selfimmolation in protest of the government’s position on war prompts Anna—in a nod to Antigone (Birch, “One”)—to give the interview. Against the official hushup, she makes Jack’s message publicly known and pays “a dreadful price” (Abrams): Andy leaks her husband’s serial betrayal to the press. In One of Us, taking a position on war directly impacts on the integrity of Anna’s family home.

The City at War in Ian McEwan’s Saturday The most distinct negotiation of home in a prewar setting is Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), a novel with a large body of critique. Research interests include the context of 9/11 and terrorism (e.g., Eaglestone; Hühn, “All in”; Tancke, “Misplaced”), contemporary crisis and the Condition of England novel (e.g., De Michelis, “Risk”; Möller; Ross), space and the city (e.g., A. Beck; Golimowska; McLeod), aesthetics and the arts (e.g., Knapp; Root), science and knowledge (e.g., Amigoni; Thrailkill), and the ethics of empathy (e.g., Amiel-Houser; Foley; Winterhalter). The war theme is not central to these studies, but many of them touch on aspects of home and war due to the novel’s narrative configuration, namely one that presents an exposed home. Magali Cornier Michael writes: Focusing on one day in a man’s life within the context of his mostly domestic routine … not only allows McEwan’s text to take on the cultural trauma that appears overwhelming and too diffuse to engage otherwise but also shatters the illusion that the private domestic realm exists as separate and as a shelter from the public political sphere. (28) Thus, the research literature acknowledges how Saturday negotiates war as an invasion into the content, bourgeois life of the protagonist (e.g., Nunius 249; Driscoll 47) to challenge the notion of home as a safe space. In the face of the impending

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invasion, home is contested ground, a battlefield of positions on war within the political climate at the time. Compressed into a single day, the plot of Saturday presents the life-world of affluent London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. It is 15 February 2003, the day of major antiwar protests, and Perowne wakes in the wee hours of the morning. Spotting a burning plane above the city, he worries about a terrorist act. Later in the morning, on his way through a city overrun by antiwar protesters, he is involved in a car accident that leads to a confrontation with local thug Baxter. Perowne gets away and resumes his day’s schedule: playing squash with a colleague, shopping, a visit to his mother at her nursing home, and his son’s jazz rehearsal. Back home, he prepares dinner for the evening’s family reunion. The gathering is interrupted when Baxter forces his way into the house to terrorise the family. He is eventually overpowered and receives a head injury. Perowne performs emergency surgery on Baxter at the hospital and, at the end of the day, once again returns home. Contemplating his further existence and the future of the country and world, he slowly retreats to the “oblivion” of sleep (279). Like Swift’s Wish You Were Here, analysed below, or Simon Stephen’s 2006 drama Motortown (chapter 5.2.), McEwan’s novel describes a narrative that begins and ends at home. The action of Saturday is limited in terms of time and space, but its narrative scope is much larger: Drawing on techniques like free indirect discourse, the novel closely follows the protagonist’s trains of thought, his sentiments and perceptions,2 to interlink the here and now of the story world with the past, the political, the urban, national, and global. It thus trades on the novel’s aptitude to explore the individual mind in context: “Saturday … celebrates the power of the novel to explore both pathological and political states of the mind and draws on uncanny politicising effects in representing the everyday,” Richard Brown writes (80). The novel’s sphere of belonging and identification is conceived through Perowne’s subjective narrative consciousness and rests on his much-discussed privileged middleclass existence (Amiel-Houser 129; A. Beck 115). Looking down onto the city from the bedroom window of his “luxurious townhouse,” he betrays an “overassertive glance,” Monika Shafi claims, a self-absorbed position (183, 188). The exclusivity of property and position translates onto the family, which forms “the most complete picture of upper-class have-it-all”: the wife desirable and successful; the daughter an aspiring poet following in the footsteps of her famous grandfather; son Theo a talented musician (Shafi 185). The house in Fitzrovia, whose luxuries Perowne marks in passing (Shafi 187), is the spatial centre of home in Saturday. The upmarket “enclave” (Ross 87) is “seal[ed] … off” (M. Ryle 28) against the urban exterior by locks and bolts and up-to-date security technology (Shafi 191): “Such defences, such mundane embattlement: beware 2

Susan Green discusses consciousness in Saturday in more detail (also, Möller 145).

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of the city’s poor, the drug-addicted, the downright bad,” Perowne observes (37). His professional sphere—the hospital and its semiotic centre, the operating theatre—is characterised by effectiveness and organised routine. Perowne needs the clear boundaries of these spaces “to establish a stable subject position,” as Anna Beck notes (117). The novel’s most acute moment of crisis is the forced entry of urban rough Baxter into Perowne’s house. The ultimate violation of home—and thus “self identity”—captured in the burglary (Chapman 133-134) is further exemplified in the threatened bodily violation of daughter Daisy who, forced to strip naked, stands exposed and vulnerable. Ultimately, Perowne will reciprocate by “violating the physical boundaries of Baxter’s body and assuming power of his physical and mental health” (A. Beck 118). This climactic scene has received much attention. Martin Ryle, for example, is interested in the aspect of class confrontation; and Swantje Möller looks at Daisy’s recital of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (147) to work out the function of literature in crisis. Scholars also frequently observe this section’s allegorical quality (e.g., Richard Brown 84). For Lawrence Driscoll, the scene realises the fear of a terrorist invasion (48); and Anne Winkel reads the conflict with Baxter as a parable for the country’s decision to go to war in Iraq (365). Susana Araújo’s observation that Saturday inverts the Iraq invasion into an invasion of the private home (62) underlines this project’s claim that, in fiction, contemporary war invades the British sphere of home. The significance of the theme of war for Saturday is contested in research. Martin Ryle claims that the novel’s “political energy lies in unease about class difference, much rather than in anything to do with Iraq” (26; also, Driscoll 47; A. Beck 109). But others object: Dominic Head finds that, even as other debates stand out, the war context is never fully displaced (The State 124). And Richard Brown writes that “Saturday could hardly be more closely embedded in the political events and discussions of the time,” that is of 9/11 as well as the Iraq War (83-84). On closer inspection, terrorism and the culture of anxiety, much discussed in the literature on Saturday, serve as condition and context for Perowne’s struggle to fix his positions towards war as he encounters the firmly defended convictions of other characters: “For or against the war on terror, or the war in Iraq…?” (180). Gupta’s central argument about Saturday is that the novel avoids a definitive political position towards war (159). Andrew Foley agrees that the novel merely registers a “subtle shift” of attitude in the protagonist and does not fix a clear position (157). The project of Saturday, Foley claims, is rather to reveal the ambivalences of both prowar and antiwar positions (147). Perowne himself is aware that his indecision is framed by contemporary conditions: Does he think that his ambivalence—if that’s what it really is—excuses him from the general conformity? … He’s lost the habits of scepticism, he’s becoming dim

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with contradictory opinion, he isn’t thinking clearly, and just as bad, he senses he isn’t thinking independently. (181) The context of his life determines Perowne’s scope of thinking and limits his possibilities of knowledge and meaning (Currie 126; also, Wall 758). Baxter’s forced entry is not the only moment of invasion in Saturday. The novel repeatedly signals the violation of the home sphere through media images. Television and radio news reports on the run-up to war intrude upon Perowne’s consciousness throughout the day. One of the first things he recalls in the morning is a radio report on Iraq weapons inspector Hans Blix, which had interfered with last night’s reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), a title suggested by his daughter to further his “literary education” (6). At this point, Perowne blocks out war, turns off the radio, and retreats into his “comfortably nostalgic” reading (6). But as the narrative proceeds, news media ever more obtrusively invade his consciousness to the point of oversaturation. Midway through the morning, Perowne frets: “Isn’t it possible to enjoy an hour’s recreation without this invasion, this infection from the public domain?” (108). But when he cooks dinner, his fearful contemporary mind again invites the images of the upcoming war into the comfort of home: “It’s a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to … a community of anxiety” (176). Ultimately, the domestic tasks of chopping, boiling, mixing, and simmering blend almost seamlessly with the television images of the war protests, Tony Blair’s Glasgow Speech,3 and military mobilisation to signal the suspension of the boundaries between the private and the mediated public. War also invades Perowne’s relationships. As an issue of dispute, war alienates him from his daughter and incites long talks with his son: They’ve never talked so much before.… They discussed Iraq of course, America and power, European distrust, Islam—its suffering and self-pity, Israel and Palestine, dictators, democracy—and then the boys’ stuff: weapons of mass destruction, nuclear fuel rods…. (34) His children present him with two positions on war to explore “in an authentically dialogic fashion” (Foley 149). The first is Theo’s much contended aphorism “think small” at the sight of global crisis (Banville; Möller 183). The position, Martin Ryle notes, reveals “its own instability”: Once aware of “the fuller and more troubling vision,” one becomes almost incapable of averting one’s gaze (26). The second is Daisy’s verbose vindication of the antiwar position, which casts her father in the role of “warmonger” (193). Perowne, “girding himself for combat,” probes refuting

3

On 15 February 2003, the day of the anti-Iraq War protests, Tony Blair gave a speech at the Labour Party spring conference (BBC, “Blair”).

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the antiwar claims even though this is “only half of what he feels” (193). The lengthy discussion frustrates him because it is without consequences, played out in the luxury of home to no avail (193). Therein lies a problem for negotiating war in Saturday: The unrealised war is undeniably present in the home sphere, but its meaning is still impalpable and unfixed, especially compared to the very real threat of Baxter. War may leave no permanent stain on the father’s relationship to his children—a certain distance exists between them anyhow, Frances Ferguson argues (50)—but neither is Perowne’s ambivalence towards war resolved. While Perowne is prowar in the discussion with Daisy, he changes his angle in the confrontation with his US colleague Jay Strauss. The American is a supporter of war and the antithesis of Perowne: determined, “impatient,” insistent, “direct” (Ferguson 50, 100; also, Foley 147). The unequal friendship is an image of the Special Relationship of the two countries: It “parodies the historical cliché of the military relationship between England and the United States,” Molly Clark Hillard writes (197). The squash game thus acquires political overtones. For Hillard, the lengthy game sequence anticipates the erosion of US-UK relations after the invasion (but before the 2005 publication of the novel). David Alderson adds that Perowne’s relation to Strauss is conditioned by “the ressentiment integral to US-British relations” (220). After their relentless battle, the defeated Briton is tellingly reluctant “to part on a bad note”; against his better knowledge as a doctor, he declares his hope for the hopeless case of one of their patients: “I think we can help her” (117). After the physical encounter with Baxter and the tense game of squash, Perowne realises that “form[s] of combat” outline his day (112; also, Tancke, “Misplaced” 96). In the course of the day, war is frequently weaved into his train of thoughts. For Perowne, the square in front of his house suggests comparison with the Iraqi desert, for instance. Both spaces offer a stage—for personal drama and for war’s “fury of industrial proportions” respectively (60). In his mind, the battlefield is transposed onto the urban terrain of his communal home (Girard 44). War thus brings “global politics to his doorsteps” (Michael 28). Perowne extends the scenario in his imagination: Still overlooking the square from his privileged position, he mentally casts himself in the position of a self-assured Saddam Hussein to sound out narrative possibilities of the war that is “going to happen. With or without the UN” (62). The imaginative overlay of war onto the city manifests in the protesters. First tokens of their presence are banners, buttons, and Bush and Blair rubber masks stacked in the square. Such details signal how “the private and the public spheres collide and overlap within the contemporary moment” in Saturday, Michael argues (28). Soon, Perowne watches an “overspill” of protesters (61) invading his immediate neighbourhood. Sceptical of their cheerfulness and strong antiwar sentiments, he tends towards support of the war. Setting out to meet his colleague at the squash club, he comes closer to the marchers who turn his urban home into a political

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space. Close up, he feels the attraction of the masses and admits: “He might have been with them, in spirit at least”—if it were not for his memories of an Iraqi patient who was tortured by the regime in Baghdad (72). At the same time, he is no less sceptical about the execution and outcome of the invasion (73). Perowne remains “suitably ambivalent” about the war (Parry 214). Finally, the political intrudes upon Perowne in the figure of Prime Minister Tony Blair, a character more often found in drama and film on contemporary war. The PM frequently appears on the news, and the role he plays as a key decision-maker in the run-up to war is also indicated by the Blair rubber masks Perowne spots in the square (61). What is more, the politician enters the surgeon’s reality in person. Confronted with the Prime Minister’s face multiplied across the screens of a television shop display, Perowne recalls a face-to-face encounter at the opening of London’s Tate Modern three years earlier. At the time, Blair had mistaken Perowne for one of the artists and, when corrected, had revealed “the briefest instant … of fleeting self-doubt” (144). Drawing on this experience (and the privileged retrospection of the 2005 novel), Perowne notes Blair’s “inherent human fallibility” (Richard Brown 89) and the possibility that future developments might prove the PM wrong: “In all, Saddam could be overthrown at too high a cost” (145). Blair also serves as a figure of contrast because his position towards war, other than Perowne’s, has a real impact: “no one really doubts that in Britain one man alone is driving the matter forward. Night sweats, hideous dreams, the wild, lurching fantasies of sleeplessness? [All Perowne] sees is certainty” (145). But he is wary of Blair’s political manoeuvres. In the Glasgow Speech, the PM propounds humanitarian reasons for war, but Perowne objects: The point “should have been made from the start. Too late now. After Blix it looks tactical” (178). These ties between the disposition of post-9/11 Britain, the debate on the upcoming invasion of Iraq, and the domestic sphere exemplify the still even more intricate nexus of home and war in Saturday. Gupta confirms that “the novel demonstrates how deeply embedded the upcoming invasion was in the routine consciousness of people in London (and presumably elsewhere), how enmeshed in the domestic” (30). Research has addressed the British character of the domestic within the contemporary context in Saturday. Michael L. Ross observes that the homeland, no longer the centre of an empire, is an elite “site of flourishing global interchange” (93). And for Elizabeth Wallace, “Perowne represents a nation in transition” (474; also, Amiel-Houser 153) that bids goodbye to independence—illustrated in his mother’s loss of autonomy—and moves on to an uncertain future (473). Such insights as well as Saturday’s ambivalence towards the invasion more generally must be seen in the context of publication: By 2005, prewar protests have come to nothing, the invasion is a given not a possibility, and WMD are still not found in Iraq. The extent of unrest that would characterise the region for years to come, on the other hand, is not anticipated yet. A conclusive answer or fixed position towards

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war would run contrary to the imaginary space the narrative opens up. This imaginary space is the home/front of Saturday: a battlefield of contesting points of view towards the war that challenges the individual—however detached and self-assured he may present himself—to take a position. The narrative does not take a final position itself and denies the possibility of a home closed off from the issues of war. Novels on the run-up to the Iraq War, like Saturday and Demo, are mostly set in urban contexts that accommodate home spaces as well as public space to extravert the popular opinion against British overseas engagement: In Saturday and One of Us, it is London; and Demo shifts between London, Florence, and the protesters’ home town Glasgow. Within the geography of these cities, new meanings emerge “to address the otherwise unspeakable and ungraspable reality” of the post-9/11 world (Golimowska 6). In Demo (and no less in Saturday), “transnational [i.e., external] forces” aggravate urban inequalities along fault lines of gender, class, and ethnicity (Bissett 66). That is not to say, however, that the rest of the homeland is spared from the impact of war. In British writing on contemporary war, home/fronts also open up in the ‘rural heart’ of the home sphere.

4.1.2.

Rural Frontlines: The Country at War

Rural home spheres that build on notions of country life as essentially British—an assumed English idyll (Head, “Mapping” 25)—appear in a number of novels about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Swift’s Wish You Were Here, for instance, is a dense account of a rural existence affected by war (chapter 4.2.). In Libby Purves’s Acting Up (2004), the English countryside—“It’s so green!” (57)—is still the largely unbroken idyll countering the barren landscape of Iraq. And the narrative of Iain Banks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007), which mirrors US-UK relations in the Iraq War context in the story of an entrepreneurial family, culminates in a family gathering at their Scottish country estate to literally sell out to the Americans. Ali Smith’s The Accidental, discussed below, presents an interesting rendition of the rural, or perhaps provincial, competing with a contemporary urban home identity shaped by the deferral of the real (Levin 38). In many of the ‘rural’ novels, the foreign conflict is interlinked with an agricultural crisis that epitomises the eradication of traditional rural life, such as the foot-and-mouth or BSE epidemics: In varying degrees of detail, the devastating consequences for stock farmers and entire country communities and the dire images of burning corpses and pyres scattered across familiar landscapes resonate with the more distant terror of war in novels such as Acting Up, Double Vision, The Accidental, and Wish You Were Here. Mary Trabucco links the rural setting of Double Vision directly to the tradition of writing about war using “pastoral forms” (“Pat”

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100). Barker’s novel, Trabucco argues, thereby makes use of the “geographical and modal distance that the pastoral provides” (“Pat” 100).

Invading the Pastoral in Pat Barker’s Double Vision More than in later texts, the wars of the 1990s are present in Pat Barker’s Double Vision (2003). The novel is set against the backdrop of the war in Afghanistan, which is, however, not yet characterised by the absurdities and sense of futility it will assume in Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations (2015). Instead, the war is part of a continuity of violent conflict arising in the 1990s. Much of the research on Double Vision and the novel itself discuss the implications of the visual representation of war. Unlike Saturday, Barker’s novel has not spawned much contention. Double Vision is read, time and again, for the overlapping aspects of the pastoral setting (e.g., Monteith and Yousaf; Trabucco, “Pat”); the traumatic effect of war and 9/11 (e.g., Atilla; Tancke, “Uses”); the ethics of representing and bearing witness to war and suffering, often referring to Susan Sontag’s 2003 publication Regarding the Pain of Others (e.g., Itakura; Trabucco “Between”); and, more specifically, the role of the arts of photography, sculpting, and creative writing (e.g., Gildersleeve). The novel begins with sculptress Kate leading a solitary life after the death of her husband Ben, a photographer, in Afghanistan. One evening, close to home, her car veers off the road and she is severely injured. Recovering only slowly, she hires odd-job man Peter to assist her in her work on a statue of Christ for the cathedral. Rather abruptly, focalisation switches to war reporter Stephen, a firsthand witness of war (Korte, “Touched” 184). His memories of violent conflict cover the Balkans, Africa, the 2001 terrorist attacks, and Afghanistan and blend “with visions of ancient conflicts, to produce a paradoxically continuous fabric out of the disjointed images of an anxious, discontinuous present,” Catherine Bernard notes (177). After the death of Ben, who was his colleague and friend, Stephen quits his job and moves to his brother’s country property to write a book on the representation of war. Switching back and forth between these focalisers, the narrative reveals a structural “double vision” (Gildersleeve 34). Barker’s novel shares Saturday’s mode of internal focalisation but is not limited to one subjectivity. Later on, narrative focalisation also briefly shifts to minor characters. Kate’s old farmhouse, which accommodates both private and professional spaces of belonging of the artist couple, is located in a rural village. The war, which bereaved Kate of her husband, leaves an imprint on this home: She registers Ben’s absence as “a cold hollow inside” (11) and preserves his study as a memorial to him and his photographic work. At the same time, the communal home sphere is tainted by a domestic crisis: an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The epidemic has led to the extermination of livestock and permanently scarred the rural community. Trabucco observes: “Local catastrophes are connected by

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invisible threads to war atrocities overseas through the preoccupations of the two central protagonists, Stephen and Kate Frobisher” (“Pat” 100). Stephen’s brother Robert confirms the associative link to war in his memories of the outbreak: “We got the first blast. They closed the roads—sent in the army. You could smell the carcasses for miles” (203-204). Sharon Monteith and Nahem Yousaf explore how in Double Vision “death and desolation, vulnerability and despair form part of Barker’s traumatized pastoral” (294). The funeral pyres brand the rural surroundings as a traumatised landscape resonating with the novel’s dark mental landscapes, Monteith and Yousaf argue; still, they uphold the view that the novel manages “a precarious balance between the sensuality inherent in the pastoral and its dissolution” (292, 293). Even without the agricultural crisis, however, at least part of the rural community is an imitation or simulation: The weekenders, indulging in the nostalgia of attending church, turn the village into a heterotopic version of a country ideal that Kate sets against the reality of the faithless locals (27). Country life as it once was, Monteith and Yousaf confirm, is disappearing: “the place turns into a commuter village” (291). Traditionally, war has been conceived as an antithesis to the pastoral (Monteith and Yousaf 292). And Stephen understands his decision to quit his job as just that—a renunciation of war: “When I got back from Afghanistan, I said, Right, that’s it, finished” (37). Consequently, he replaces London, the urban home base for his job as a war correspondent, with a supposedly safe rural residence. But he is neither faithful to his decision—he goes to The Hague to cover the Milosevic trial—nor is the escape to the country effective: The atrocities Stephen witnessed abroad, the images of a girl raped and killed in Sarajevo, follow him in dreams and traumatic flashbacks (Gildersleeve 37). What is more, the images actually blend into his present experiences, namely his “unlikely relationship” with Justine, the nineteen-year-old who looks after his nephew Adam, Philip Tew notes (205-206). Stephen’s reality is so overpowered by the traumatic visions of war that Justine “seemed at first to be part of the dream” (55) instead of the reverse. This impression is later confirmed at other moments of the narrative (Tancke, “Uses” 88; also, Banita 63). War encroaches upon Stephen’s consciousness so relentlessly that Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma applies exactly to his situation: “To be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4-5). Drawing on observations of Jacques Derrida, Aylin Atilla notes that Stephen’s traumatic memory “functions as a repetition of the past” that signals a struggle to attach meaning to the experience of the traumatic event (12). Furthermore, trauma infringes on Stephen’s perception—and that of other characters—and even writes itself into the narrative: Cracked or brittle surfaces accumulate across the text (5, 47, 73, 121, 180), most prominently in Justine’s dream of walking across a frozen lake (266), to signify the “breach of a border” inherent in the traumatic (Luckhurst, The Trauma 3).

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Across the narrative, the intrusion of war into the minds of the characters also translates into material form, starting with Kate’s car accident. For her, it reproduces the frontline death of Ben: “She was thinking of another road, in Afghanistan, the road Ben had died on. For a moment she felt a deep affinity with him, a closeness, and then it vanished” (14). The physical traumata she sustains also resonate with the loss of Ben. She experiences his absence as “an amputation she had to learn to live with” (32; also, Monteith and Yousaf 297). Two objects in particular signifying that Ben still occupies Kate’s mind: Kate wears and repeatedly touches the amulet Ben wore when he was killed (e.g., 172, 218); the other object is a bronze bust of Ben in her living room. In Double Vision, observations on material properties are frequent; and bronze, in this context, comes to signify the transitional state between death and life: Kate, for instance, notes the bust’s cold and lifeless forehead (301); and for Stephen, firelight turns his brother’s face into a lifeless “bronze mask” at one point (47); on the other hand, Ben’s bust, which already evokes his presence, comes to life when it is illuminated by bickering flames (116, 119); and Kate’s statue, too, will come ‘alive’ when it is cast in bronze. The most emphatic material realisations of invasion are two instances of intrusion into the homes of the protagonists. After the accident, Kate struggles with the fact that she has to hire help Peter who, she fears, will intrude upon her working process on the statue. On top of this, Peter turns out to be “a sinister, voyeuristic presence in the community” (Showalter) and “represents a failure of empathic seeing in the novel” (Kauffmann 94). His “uncanny figure, menacing and yet strangely seductive” (De Michelis, “Like” 172), deeply unsettles Kate when she finds him alone in her studio one stormy night. He wears her clothes and mimes chiselling on the statue, performing empty gestures that have no effect whatsoever. The scene’s signification escapes Kate: “she couldn’t begin to understand what she was dealing with—she couldn’t foresee what his reaction would be” (178). Still, the meaninglessness of the scene before her suggests a threat: She fears Peter might be her “deranged double,” revealing “the truth about her” and threatening her own existence as a sculptress with the same meaninglessness (179). In view of the novel’s concern with the representation of war, Peter’s “sociopathic” performance (Gildersleeve 35) may “act as an incisive critique of unempathetic constructions of war correspondents and photographers as detached observers and ‘neutral’ reporters of atrocities,” Lidia De Michelis argues (“Like” 172). The second home invasion is the burglary of Stephen’s home. When his brother leaves for a weekend trip with his wife, Justine and Stephen stay at their house to take care of Adam. In effect, they are “playing house” (233), simulating “oldfashioned circa 1950s family life” (234). The idyll is emphatically disrupted when burglars enter the upscale country residence—an invasion that is contextualised by Stephen’s musings about the media reporting on the Gulf War and the conflicts in the Balkans which avoided images of human suffering: “These were wars designed

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to ensure that fear and pain never came home” (242). But the home sphere can no longer be kept free from war and violence. Leaving the house one day to walk up a nearby hill, Stephen witnesses helplessly from afar how burglars enter the property and how Justine returns to the house, unaware of their presence. He cannot see the burglars’ attack on her from his position. Thus, rushing down the hill, Stephen fearfully remembers only the traumatic images of the “many raped and tortured girls” he saw as a war reporter (250; also, Tancke, “Uses” 88). As the countryside is turned into a “scene of random violence and pain” (Brannigan 157), the physical attack becomes a manifestation of war and violence in the homeland. The potential for violence also resides within Stephen himself: Returning to the house, he picks up a bronze statue—again, material is crucial—to kill Justine’s attacker: “Years of impacted rage had gone into the blow he’d aimed at the back of the burglar’s head. He’d meant it to kill” (250). War is present at home—and violence in the mind of its inhabitants. In Double Vision, the images of the wars of the 1990s reached the homeland in ‘sanitised’ versions only: Pictures of human loss and suffering did not enter. As the burglary suggests and the memories that haunt Stephen show, this fantasy of impermeability is suspended in the context of the war in Afghanistan. The novel contemplates at length the ethics of representing war—or, more particularly, suffering in war—in the home sphere. Not unlike Saturday, Double Vision explores a representational ethics of empathy and probes art’s potential to make sense of war through dialogue. As Jessica Gildersleeve notes, “the artistic representation of violence in Double Vision seeks to introduce a dialogue between the violence and the witness,” that is, the novel stresses the “importance of looking and of responding” (37; emphasis added). This is what Krista Kauffmann calls the “ethical double vision” endorsed in Double Vision: It is grounded in empathy and pairs production (artistic creation) and reception (seeing) of images of suffering with a critical awareness of these very processes (93, 88-89). Similarly, Trabucco shows how Double Vision emphasises the necessity to “regularly interrupt” the contemplation of the image—the moment of witnessing—to call to mind the fact that the image points towards a reality of suffering: “this is the truth” (“Between” 157). Stephen’s book project, which uses the images of Ben, is the narrative occasion to explore such issues of visual representation; and it is a means for Stephen to deal with his traumatic experiences: “Ben’s death in Afghanistan is one of the traumas of which Stephen’s book can be thought to be a working through,” Mark Rawlinson writes (128). Through Ben’s photographs, Stephen assigns meaning to his own war experience. Towards the middle of the narrative, the pictures bring together Stephen and Kate. They start a discussion of Francisco de Goya’s war paintings and the ethics of representation, referring back to Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, a source explicitly mentioned by Barker (Trabucco, “Pat” 109). The novel’s epigraph cites captions from Goya’s works that problematise the position of the war witness:

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“No se puede mirar. One cannot look at this. Yo lo vi. I saw it. Esto es lo verdadero. This is the truth.” Kauffmann, again, notes an “insistent doubleness” in this hesitation between ethical discretion and the need to bear witness in the face of images of violence (81). Stephen experiences the hesitation when he comes across Ben’s image of the raped Sarajevo girl who haunts him in his dreams. Though Ben shows only ‘the truth,’ the scene as it was, Stephen feels the camera violates the woman a second time (121). At the end of their discussion about Goya, however, Kate and Stephen agree at least in one point: that Ben’s decision to continue to produce and show images of war was justified (Kauffmann 84; also, Gildersleeve 32). Ben’s very last picture, the one that cost him his life in Afghanistan, presents an apocalyptic vision: the debris of the rusting hardware of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. For Stephen, the image asserts the continuity of violence and the eradication of humanity: “the world as it would be after the last human being had left, forgetting to turn out the light” (123). The image expresses Stephen’s inner doubt whether there is a possibility for him to overcome his war trauma or whether oblivion and eradication is all that remains. Through Ben’s photographic work at home, mostly landscape photography, both Kate and Stephen come to understand the inherent darkness of the home sphere itself (Mars-Jones). For Kate, Ben’s English landscapes override the antithesis of peaceful home and violent war zone: “You always knew, looking at these empty fields, these miles of white sand with marram grass waving in the wind, that somewhere, close at hand, but outside the frame, a murder had been committed” (6465). At home, violence is merely suppressed or concealed. Stephen has basically the same insight—and embeds it, more concretely, in the history of warfare on domestic grounds: Border country. That’s why Ben … photographed it so obsessively, Stephen thought, because he came back from whatever war he’d been covering to a place where every blade of grass had been fought over, time and time again, for centuries, and now the shouts and cries, the clash of swords on shields had faded into silence, leaving only sunlight heaving on acres of grass, and a curlew crying. (282) Here, home appears as an open space not safely secured against war by definition but characterised as an embattled transitional zone in which the border is negotiated in warfare. In Double Vision, Trabucco notes, there is a “continuity between foreign war zones and a contemporary English wasteland [which] reveals that the pastoral can operate powerfully within contemporary political contexts” (“Pat” 113). Double Vision closes with Stephen’s report on what he witnessed in Afghanistan. So far, Stephen narrated a number of terrible experiences, such as being in New York on 9/11 or stumbling over the raped girl in Sarajevo. The death of his friend, however, had been the ‘gap’ in the history of his war experiences (Rippl,

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Schweighauser, and Steffen 9). Now, he is finally able to narrate the traumatic event. The novel ends on the hopeful note that because of the shared experience of the burglary the unlikely relationship of Justine and Stephen might turn into something more serious (Banita 65). Initially, the “oblivion and ecstasy” of the affair merely had a therapeutic effect on Stephen, as Michèle Roberts notes; but at the end of the novel, Stephen and Justine still walk together—“half in the water, half on land.” The resilience of their love is suggested by the marram grass in the background, which had also appeared in Ben’s darker vision of the homeland. According to Giorgiana Banita, the domestic crisis of the burglary is the “existential intervention” (68)—or else, “epiphany” (Monteith and Yousaf 285)—that induces Stephen to leave behind his traumatic preoccupation with war, which had led to the dissolution of his first marriage, and once again turn towards interpersonal communion and commitment. War may disconnect “people from their normal life, leaving psychological wounds and traumatic memories,” as Atilla writes (19); but, in Double Vision, its violent order may as well lead back to the community of home (here: romantic love) as it creates an awareness for the embattled state of home. In Stephen, Double Vision introduces a character that also appears in a number of other novels of contemporary war: the war correspondent. As travellers of foreign and domestic spaces, war reporter figures play a role for the narrative representation of war as an invasion into the home sphere. Much of the research on Double Vision mentions the particular relevance of Stephen’s occupation for the themes of the novel (Showalter; Monteith and Yousaf 292; Trabucco, “Pat” 101). Angelika Korte explores more generally the function of war correspondent characters in both fiction and nonfiction in Represented Reporters (2009) and other of her writings.

4.1.3.

In the War Zone: Soldiers and War Correspondents

In novels on contemporary war, the war correspondent is a frequent traveller across the geographic and semiotic borders of home. Apart from Double Vision, war reporters appear, for instance, in Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, which deals with a British journalist’s illusory infatuation with a colleague from the US, in Minette Walters’s The Devil’s Feather (2005), a novel about a Reuters correspondent who is terrorised by a British mercenary (Reaves 159), and in Catherine Hall’s The Repercussions (2015), in which war photographer Jo is traumatised by the death of her Afghan stringer. By virtue of their profession, these figures lend themselves to make sense of the experience of war through (media) representation. At the same time, they provoke questions concerning the ethics of representation (Korte, “Being” 432-434). In Meek’s novel, for example, the war reporter plans to write a “bestselling novel pitched at the militaristic market” (35) that disregards his experience and, instead, exploits genre conventions to greedily capitalise on war. The

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reporter’s observation that “the marketable truth in Afghanistan lacked narrative or familiar reference points” reveals his cynical perspective on war (123). Ironically, the book deal is called off not because war is misrepresented but because the unsympathetic representation of the American characters disqualifies the novel for the US market—which it depends on to turn a profit: “We don’t need another piece of anti-American bullshit,” the editor barks (173). The visual representation of war is especially significant in the context of the “hyper-mediated” wars since the 1990s (De Michelis, “Like” 169), such as the conflicts in the Balkans or the Gulf War, whose displacement through media representation was famously explored in Jean Baudrillard’s Gulf War essays (Rawlinson 131). The analysis of Double Vision illustrated how the figure of the war photographer provides an opportunity to reflect on the visual in narrative fiction. In The Repercussions, the photographer also reflects on the influence of images on the imagination of war at home: “Photographing something makes it matter…. It’s how those who aren’t there understand a war. At least, that’s what I always thought, but now I’m not so sure” (75). She recapitulates her photo project in an Afghan women’s prison and struggles to find a way to present the images to a British public oversaturated with similar images. Written in the first person, the novel further shows that photographer and reporter characters work as human filters that bring the war home: “thanks to their physical and psychological involvement, they mediate war in human terms,” Korte notes (“Touched” 184). Invoking the topos of return from war, the literary war reporter facilitates semiotic exchange between war and home sphere. The primal traveller of war literature, however, is the soldier. The “cliché” of the returnee implies a combatant traumatised by war (Luckhurst, “In War Times” 719). In fact, the themes of trauma and return often cannot be separated. In Purves’s Acting Up, soldier Callum and army medic Susie return from war but are unable to continue as before. Callum breaks up with Susie and disappears for weeks on end. Periods of emotional blankness and inner turmoil following the traumatic war experience are reflected in the calm and storm of Callum’s sailing trip. For Susie, the ramifications of war manifest more subtly, belatedly. She develops physical and emotional symptoms that eventually lead to exhaustion. Aspects of trauma are not necessarily limited to returnees from the war zone, but these figures are particularly prone to developing traumatic symptoms, such as the protagonists in O’Hagan’s The Illuminations or Liz Trenow’s The Poppy Factory (2014). In many novels, war’s impact on the homeland also unsettles those who stay at home and witness the devastating consequences of war by proxy, like war widow Kate in Double Vision. The loss of loved ones on the battlefield or because they return changed beyond recognition affects relatives and partners in The Illuminations, The Repercussions, Acting Up, and The Poppy Factory. In Wish You Were Here, farmer’s son Jack is both deeply troubled by the loss of the family farm in the aftermath of the

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BSE crisis and the death of his brother in Iraq. Here, the literary topos of return from war is intricately interweaved with the traumatic: The home-based hero is haunted by a revenant soldier, namely the ‘ghost’ of his dead brother (chapter 4.2.). In action novels, soldiers with Afghanistan or Iraq War experience are readily cast as hero. As a response to contemporary war, however, the genre is not particularly illuminating. Suman Gupta has analysed this kind of popular genre fiction in Imagining Iraq. Both Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Weapon (2006) and Andy McNab’s Deep Black (2004) are printed in large numbers, Gupta notes, but neither reveal anything “distinctive” that would qualify as more than formulaic genre action (148). In the context of Iraq, Gupta suggests, the action thriller failed because the premises of the genre were subverted: The “habituated thrill” was overtaken by “the enormity” of reality, and the “routinized acceptance of [ethical and ideological] background presumptions” was undermined by the widespread “analytical interrogativeness” at home (153). In crime novels like Minette Walters’s The Chameleon’s Shadow (2007), the war reference is, according to Luckhurst, likewise just a “red herring” (“In War Times” 719). Soldier novels such as Patrick Bishop’s Follow Me Home (2011) and Barney Campbell’s Rain (2015) also revolve around military figures, deal with military war settings, and include detailed scenes of combat. Like action thrillers, they suggest “military verisimilitude” (Massie; also, Gupta 146-147) by including maps, military jargon, glossaries, and notes advertising the author’s firsthand war experience. Yet, the novels seem to take a somewhat more ‘literary’ stance4 than straightforward action thrillers. Form and style of Rain are reminiscent of nonfiction war memoirs (Anthony) and suggest autobiographical insight (Glancy). The adventure plot of Follow Me Home sends the soldier protagonists on a quest trough the Afghan nowhere, creating a narrative of homecoming superimposed on the story of a battlefield mission. An assignment gone wrong forces a small unit of soldiers to return to their home base across enemy territory, without backup or means of communication. This narrative illustrates that the British home sphere in fiction on contemporary war is by no means limited to the geographic location of the UK. It may arise wherever an area is marked off as ‘ours’ against an exterior. In Follow Me Home, the base camp works in this way. The novel’s title already implicates the soldiers’ destination, the camp, as home; its riverside location and name (‘Longdon’) also refer to a central home location (London) and thus substantiate this claim. Like the action thriller, however, these novels rarely challenge established conceptions of war and home. They present war as an experience that confirms and reaffirms British male military identity. 4

Suman Gupta distinguishes literary and genre fiction on the grounds of a “contract between authors (texts), publishers, distributors and readers”; that is, market conditions separate texts “that can be read unthinkingly” from more ambitious writing (154-155).

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Young and Female Perspectives in David Massey’s Torn Though it shares the soldier protagonist and battlefield setting of Follow Me Home and Rain, David Massey’s Torn (2012) is a specific case. Released by Chicken House, the novel is the only text in the corpus that targets a young-adult audience, which accounts for its specific concerns, young love and child characters—and for the improbabilities of the story. Though it does not present the most reflected negotiation of the home sphere, the novel still highlights how the concern for the home sphere asserts itself against any interest in the extrasemiotic world of the other. Torn follows Ellie, a “normal nineteen-year-old English girl,” on her first assignment as an army medic in Afghanistan (1). When she goes out on her first patrol, her unit encounters an unlikely enemy, a group of armed Afghan children. As carriers of sympathy (Gavin, Introduction 15), the children and especially one girl “with piercing pale green eyes” (25) arouse Ellie’s interest in Afghan life. The children fight the Taliban but also coalition forces, who allegedly destroyed their mountain village in a drone attack. In the face of a home overturned by war, the group—like many child characters in contemporary literature—is compelled to take responsibility in the absence of the parent generation (Sands-O’Connor 225). Torn quickly affirms that the Afghan village is not the only embattled home; the British camp itself comes under fire. The distress of the attack melts British animosities towards a team of US special forces that arrived at their base earlier. Bit by bit, Ellie forms a friendship with their young commander, confirming the “special relationship” of their countries (54). When the British and American soldiers go on a joint mission to find a Taliban arms cache close to the ruined village, the paleeyed girl is (implausibly) identified as the child of an American journalist who lived in the village. The attack on the settlement thus emerges as an assault on the home of one of their own. And Ellie’s interest in Afghan life is displaced by her concern for the impossibly Western population of the foreign community. Even the responsibility for the initial attack is conveniently transferred from the coalition forces to a scheming “suspect in the Afghan government” (257). Torn, then, reaffirms rather plainly for its young audience that war always signifies an attack on ‘us,’ on the home sphere. Torn’s soldier protagonist Ellie also exemplifies a new emphasis on female perspectives in novels on contemporary war. Authoresses are responsible for half of the novels in the corpus and just as many of the works (and not only those by female authors) have female protagonists. Still more interesting is the placing and function of some of these female characters: The traditional link between women, passivity, and the home front had been challenged before, namely in the context of the World Wars that required female participation in public and work life (Plain 166). But it is contemporary war that also sees women invading the traditionally male sphere of the battlefield. The female soldiers in Acting Up and Torn are joined

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by the traumatised army medic from The Poppy Factory, the war photographer and her Afghan stringer in The Repercussions, and an American war correspondent in We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. However, in other terms, these women do not waive all gendered oppositions in the context of war. The female soldiers, for instance, usually work in the nurturing position of medic or in noncombatant communications units. And in Torn, the female soldier—just like the lead in the first season of the television series Our Girl (2014-) (chapter 6.1.4.)—shows motherly affection for an enigmatic Afghan girl. Occasionally, these novels show an interest in other marginalised identities: Acting Up contrasts the story of soldier Susie with that of her homosexual brother, who builds a career as a travesty artist, while she goes to war and comes back deeply troubled. Queer identities also appear in The Repercussions. Not only does the protagonist mourn the loss of her own female partner; in the journal of a greatgreat-aunt, she also reads about a homosexual army medic working in a home front hospital during World War I. The latter is also of Indian origin, implicating the issues of race and Empire. The question, however, remains whether the texts actually constitute a challenge of social preconceptions. The widely travelled homosexual female protagonist of The Repercussions eventually turns away from war after a traumatic experience, as do many of the figures that enter the war zone. Learning that she is pregnant, she turns towards her role as mother and settles down to build a home for her child— reinforcing, yet again, the centrality of a traditional home sphere in the reaction to contemporary war.

4.1.4.

Histories of War: Memory and the Past

In both The Poppy Factory and The Repercussions, female perspectives overlap with another concern of novels on contemporary war: a link to the past. Most often, this past is an experience of the culturally established events of the World Wars. The semiotics of these wars provide a reference point or template for the overwhelming, unreadable experiences of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, which have not yet been categorised appropriately (Luckhurst, “In War Times” 713-714). The Poppy Factory and The Repercussions intersperse their present-day storylines with wartime journals of female ancestors whose early-twentieth-century life is set against the protagonists’ struggle to make sense of war today; and All the Nice Girls alternates between a present-day storyline and a World War II setting without assuming the outer form of a diary. Structurally similar is also the mystery of dementia patient Anne in The Illuminations. Her life as a young woman only gradually reveals itself to her soldiergrandson Luke in her fragmentary memories and through pieces of evidence like old letters or her photographic work. Roger Luckhurst, writing on literature of the Iraq War, noted that “the resistance to narrative or representation of this contemporary war means that cultural

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narratives about it are often displaced or filtered through the iconography of prior wars” (“In War Times” 722). For Luckhurst, this displacement works at the expense of any direct reference to contemporary conflicts. In the above-mentioned novels, however, the contemporary level of the narrative provides a material diegetic frame for the intradiegetic retrospective on the older war. The Illuminations, for instance, combines the traumatic frontline experience of the soldier with the enigmatic past of his grandmother.

Old and New Conflicts in Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations (2015) brings together many of the recurring concerns in novels of contemporary war: “war and art, photography and fiction, and memory and secrets” (Kirsch) are embedded in the story of a soldier and his family at home. Like Pat Barker’s Double Vision, The Illuminations has two main protagonists, soldier Luke Campbell and his grandmother Anne Quirk, a pioneering documentary photographer in her day. The novel alternates between frontline action in Afghanistan and a troubled family setting at home. The dementia of Anne, who lives in her memories rather than in the here and now of her sheltered housing home, emphasises memory and the past as central concerns of the novel. Like her neighbour and friend Maureen, she lives emotionally detached from her offspring. The artist Anne fails to connect with her unimaginative daughter Alice and is close only with her grandson Luke, in whom she had “instilled … a love of art and literature” (Forbes). In The Illuminations, dementia is “cast in a rosy glow, as though [Anne] were an idiot savant, not the victim of a paranoia-inducing mental disease,” Ludovic Hunter-Tilney diagnoses. Her illness, a narrative device rather than medical condition, turns Anne into an unreliable narrator of her own story. For much of the novel, her previous life remains a mystery. In her increasingly fragmented present, she fantasises about a rabbit; otherwise, she resorts to inscrutable memories of Harry Blake, the love of her life. His transfigured image displaces her sense of self: “My history begins with Harry” (8). Anne’s story suggests a family secret buried in a “complex tangle of memory and its slippage, willful forgetting, and intentional reconstruction of the past” (Trooboff). Truth—“erratic, patchy, often unwelcome, and hard to get at” (H. Lee)—emerges as another major theme in The Illuminations. And there is not just the one truth either: It resides in uncovering the mystery of Anne’s life, in finding a way to be true to yourself, and in the representational truth of Anne’s photographic work. Alice explains: “My mother has always behaved as if the truth was the biggest thing. The photographs she took … were all about that” (161). But seeing the truth is clearly a problem in the novel: Perception is either “obscured by the fog of dementia—or the fog of war” (Wheeler).

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The powerful imagery of light “burn[s] everywhere in the dark world” of the novel: as “light of truth” (H. Lee), in the spectacle of the Blackpool Illuminations, or as shaping power in photography (Daniel). It interlinks not only the two storylines (Liu) but also the battlefield setting with the homeland. Watching the lights of combat one night, Luke thinks of home: He “examined the red returning fire—red was Allied, green was Terry—and thought of those strings of lights you get at funfairs. He … thought of Ayrshire nights when the amusement arcade became the brightest thing on the coast” (75). Moreover, the lives of Luke and Anne are interlinked not least because of the nature of their homes: Living alone, both substitute family with neighbours or comrades. Reviewer Stuart Kelly confirms, “the camaraderie [of the military home] is echoed in the strange alliances in Saltcoats’s ‘assisted-living community.’” The novel, a war-and-peace narrative that “deals in opposites” (Forbes), shifts smoothly between the sheltered Scottish home and the “baked landscapes of war-torn Afghanistan” (Donaldson). The narrative sets the contemplative mode of one storyline against “the blaze of action and banter” of the other (Day). This structural juxtaposition is, for Adam Kirsch, a reflection of “the schizophrenia of Britain’s war in Afghanistan, which like its war in Iraq was begun under American auspices.” And for Alix Hawley, there is a “fearful symmetry” between these settings in the loss of touch with reality: War can be as hallucinatory as dementia (Forbes; also, B. Walker). In the beginning of the novel, Luke is stationed in Afghanistan, a precarious place of residence where all safety lies in the community of the soldiers. But his flat in Britain is even less of a home: “Alice had worried that maybe her son didn’t really know how to live. He was one of those people whose sitting room is full of travel stuff … as if he didn’t really live anywhere and just wanted to be in transit” (24). Luke is uprooted and essentially homeless. Like his grandmother, he has no central male figure in his family life, a gap that leaves the family fragmented. Luke’s father Sean, also a soldier, was killed in Northern Ireland many years ago. And Anne’s Harry, it emerges, left her after a noncommittal affair and was never a steady presence in her life either. She seeks refuge in romanticised memories, while Luke joins up like his absent father—the affiliation of his regiment to Ireland is no coincidence (35). But the “disaster [of war] warp[s] his vision of life on the homefront,” Malcolm Forbes notes, the heat and the barren landscape, the chaos of battle, “and the inertia of inaction that follows” (Haverty). The “counter-productive senselessness of western involvement” (Boland) in The Illuminations makes Afghanistan a British Vietnam (Windsor) and leaves Luke a “disillusioned idealist” (Hunter-Tilney). Luke’s superior, Major Scullion, “a Conradian Kurtz figure” (H. Lee), illustrates this character of war. Literate and deeply interested in the country, he loves Afghanistan “more than home” (44). But what he witnessed from the Falklands to Iraq has changed him:

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He loved the metaphysics of the new wars, where one spoke of freedom, of delivering security, but as he put down his head and meshed his trembling fingers he pictured slain Bosnians [and] corpses in burnt-out cars on the Basra Road and rebel soldiers lying dead by a runway north of Freetown, their eyes open to democracy.… And it was all a mystery to him now, all at an end, the resolutions, agreements, interventions. (150) Afghanistan leaves him on the brink of madness. Since the separation from his wife, home has become a battlefield (47): “He was a veteran of many battles but life at home was casting doubt over his authority” (49). He has no resources left to face the futility of the British mission and the unlearned lessons of history as they tread on historical Anglo-Afghan battle sites (Trooboff). Unfit to command, Scullion’s ultimate “error of judgement” (Haverty) is a detour into an Afghan village where their translator turns on them and they are attacked. When one of his men dies, Scullion shoots frantically at the translator’s dead body. Shortly after, he runs into enemy fire and loses both legs. For Kirsch, “Scullion embodies the West’s own loss of confidence in the power of its military to make any real difference in the world.” Witnessing the major collapse under the pressure of war, Luke reaches “the end of his own dark corridor” (150)—“the depth of his disillusion,” as Lucy Daniel writes. For Luke, Scullion comes to embody the “mistakes that led him [into war]” (150). Luke turns his back on war and on the idea of a national home: “Any pride in what he’s been doing in the army, any sense of nationhood, is gone” (H. Lee). While Stephen in Double Vision retreated to the country, Luke turns to another stronghold of the British home: the family ideal. In his disordered family, however, members are disconnected, and the family history is scrambled in the unreliable narrative of his grandmother. Not all the losses of the family may be recovered—father and grandfather are dead—, but the family history may be reconstructed. “Anne’s secrets become a powerful part of Luke’s salvation when he returns from Afghanistan, very nearly destroyed by his mission gone horribly wrong,” Dani Shapiro writes. Luke decides to spark the memory of his grandmother with a trip to the Illuminations in Blackpool, the seaside town where she spent her time with Harry. The transient, heterotopic character of this holiday place befits Anne’s account of their relationship, which had been gradually revealed as illusory hero-worshipping. For her, the holiday apartment works as a family home it never truly is. Here, Anne is known as ‘Mrs Blake’ and, in a desperate attempt to stabilise her fantasy of family and to translate it into a deceptive continuity, she bought the place long after Harry left her. The world she creates is a telling fantasy, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which serves as an intertext for the novel and provides a point of reference for Anne’s hallucinations of the rabbit. Her daughter Alice is also fittingly “bewildered by the older generation’s inaccessibility” (Hawley). The elusive Harry,

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it appears, was neither Anne’s husband nor the World War II hero he claimed to be but a fraud who already had a family elsewhere and who abandoned Anne when she became pregnant: “the great Harry … had left her in the lurch, and that was the thing she could never say” (259). In Blackpool, the extent of his deceit is revealed: “Harry was like a bird, actually hollow inside…. He wasn’t a bad man. He just wasn’t there. Wasn’t solid. And she found a purpose in covering for him and was happy in her own way” (282). At the same time, a much darker truth emerges: Harry was also responsible for the accidental death of Alice’s twin brother—a traumatic loss that explains Anne’s secretive character. Recovering the truth about his family makes a difference for Luke and his position towards his family: He knew … it explained the people he loved. All his life his family had been moving, perhaps invisibly, perhaps unknowingly, around this terrible event that happened years ago and that was never mentioned. His hand shook when he reached for his pint, as if this secret about Anne had suddenly recast the story of his childhood and his mother’s childhood too, changing everything. (283) Like the motto of his regiment, “veritas vos liberabit” (37), knowing about his family liberates Luke “from an imagined past and a preordained future” (Rawson). He sets out to mend family relationships and build a truthful and meaningful home in the here and now. The Illuminations “dramatises the ways lives twist and turn in concert with history,” Max Liu writes. The novel turns away from the pointless military engagement and towards the “strong, inextricable bond” of family (Forbes). It does not follow, however, that war can be kept out eventually. British life is indelibly marked by war: “Life had been rearranged, and always is” (283). War had taken his father and, as Luke learns in the end, the life of Major Scullion, who killed himself because his traumatised mind and injured body left him unable to reconnect to home. Luke urges his comrades: “Remember Charlie [Scullion] at his best” (284). But principally, Luke turns towards home and decides to listen and to understand his mother for her own history. War in The Illuminations changes the perspective on the sphere of belonging, on the relationships and people at home. In the end, the novel allows a conciliatory glimpse into the thoughts of the aged Anne, who is content with the temporary happiness and belonging Harry had meant to her: “This is your home tonight,” she had assured him (292; emphasis added). Her thoughts resound with her grandson’s return to family, his determinedness to mend and forgive. Home manifests as a decision, as a making of home in the circumstances, however adverse, in which the characters find themselves.

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4.1.5.

Private Wars: Embattled Families

While the idea of making the past work in the contemporary context informs the macrostructure of novels like The Illuminations, The Poppy Factory, and The Repercussions, forms of memory and remembrance are also relevant on the story level of many of the other novels. Often, these retrospections coincide with a family setting. Wish You Were Here, for instance, tells the story of a family rooted in war remembrance to explore the present-day repercussions of war on the individual’s notions of home. The history of the family friendship in One of Us is intertwined with the past thirty years of domestic politics—until the political manoeuvrings in the runup to war in Iraq corrupt the friendship. In Demo and The Illuminations, the home provided by family members and carried by family history is shaken to its very foundations against a background of contemporary conflict. Though embattled, family reacts to war invading the British home sphere and fights back: In Saturday, for instance, the family is reconfirmed; and at the end of The Steep Approach to Garbadale and Wish You Were Here, the protagonists commit wholeheartedly to their partner to open a new chapter of family history.

Home Unguarded in Ali Smith’s The Accidental The challenges of home and family are also central themes in Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005). The novel tells the story of the Smart family from London who spend their summer in a shabby country house in an insignificant Norfolk village. Subtly but suggestively, the situation of home and family resounds with the ripples of war that reach the homeland in “sporadic, ghostly references” (Levin 38). While Ulrike Tancke downplays the topical references (Deceptive 42), Emily Horton acknowledges the relevance of “personal and public catastrophic experience, in relation to [the] Iraq War background” for The Accidental (“Everything” 639). In conversation with Louise France, Ali Smith confirms that she sees The Accidental as “a war novel.” “We lived through a war as though we were not at war in this country,” Ali Smith explains (qtd. in France)—and therefore, a “marginalization of the Iraq war” on the surface of the novel may be exactly the point (Levin 44). In the novel, the family members live in their holiday home as if they were not inwardly separated. Secretly, both writer Eve and college professor Michael are disappointed with the lease. In this “rustic but treacherous dwelling,” Patrick O’Donnell writes, “the dysfunction of the family and the familiar takes place within a simulation of a domesticated natural order” (90). Eve’s twelve-year-old daughter Astrid, stepdaughter to Michael, openly expresses her disgust for the “substandard” house (8). As a heterotopic space, the holiday house at once represents and suspends the idea of home (Foucault 332): It gathers the family and outwardly reproduces their urban residence; but it is “temporary housing” only (O’Donnell 90)

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and the family members live isolated from one another. Nor is this house a safe space, although for the parents it is a quintessentially English space (Radcliffe 19) and deceptively suggests a rural ideal of security (Fischer 37). The unlocked doors of the house signify the vulnerability of the dysfunctional family. All too soon, house and family are invaded by vagrant thirty-something Amber. Switching between the perspectives of Eve, Michael, Astrid, and her older brother Magnus, the narrative explores their reactions to the intrusion across three sections: “The beginning,” “The middle,” and “The end.” Amber achieves a sort of “chameleon status” (Tew 212). In the first-person narratives preceding and following the three main sections, she appears as the enigmatic Alhambra; in between, she rather embodies the various desires and deficits of the family members (O’Donnell 96). The novel reflects critically on the image of intrusion. Though Amber violates the border of the family home, she “perversely … may serve as a force for renewal” (Tew 212). As “a turning point or life-changing event” (Tancke, “Narrative” 77), she inspires self-assurance and “self-protection” in Astrid, counters “traumatic numbness and repetition” in Magnus, promotes “a self-fulfilling female independence” in Eve, and elicits “self-control” and “emotional maturity” in Michael (Horton, “Everything” 642-644). As a strategy of cultural self-representation, however, the image of intrusion stems from and asserts a mentality of victimhood. The parents in particular wallow in self-pity (Horton, “Everything” 641, 643). With regards to the novel’s war context, this reflects critically on British culture in times of contemporary war more generally. The real-life invasion and occupation of Iraq by British troops is implicated not only because the family is holidaying in the summer of 2003, shortly after the invasion. Episodes and aspects of the conflict, such as the WMD debate and the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, are explicitly reflected upon. Still, The Accidental explores its theme of war not on a level of immediate effect of the military campaign on the life of the protagonists. In the novel, home and war spheres interlink in the mood, dispositions, and preoccupations of the time, that is, in the here and now of British life and in the correlation of private and public concerns. The effect is subtle but powerful: The military battlefield is absent from the novel; the embattled field of the family is all the more present. Michael, stepfather to Magnus and Astrid, is no longer committed to Eve, whom he habitually betrays with his female students. When Amber appears, he becomes embarrassingly infatuated with her. Eve herself hides in the inglorious garden shed, advertised as an “elegant summerhouse” (83). Here, removed from family life, she despairs over her latest book project. Magnus’s depressive withdrawal is a symptom of his guilty grief over the suicide of a girl at school. For a while he steers towards suicide. And Astrid, the neglected twelve-year-old secretly scorned by her mother, struggles to make sense of her existence while she looks at life through the lens of her camera, recording all her experiences during this “substandard summer” (8). Her profound isolation and

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alienation manifest in her aversion of the well-worn interior of the holiday home. It is from her observant but fragmentary perspective and naive, often oblivious grasp of the adult world that readers are initially introduced to the dysfunctional family. As the perspectives of her parents and brother are added, a more comprehensive if at all times distinctly subjective image of the story world ensues. The novel’s Baudrillardian idea of replacing the real for the simulacrum is noted by Tancke (Deceptive 42), Monica Germanà and Emily Horton (Introduction 4) as well as Susan Alice Fischer: In “the novel, each member of the Smart family mistakes simulation for reality,” Fischer writes (40). Julia Breitbach points out that “[Ali] Smith has noted how contemporary generations have been thoroughly conditioned by visual mass media” (127). It is interesting, then, that Astrid categorises her family in terms of time lived in the new century. Astrid herself is “25 per cent new, 75 per cent old” (11). But experiencing the world through her camera lens distorts her vision and signals a “breakdown … in signification” (Levin 40). When she first meets Amber, the camera viewer floods with light so bright that she can’t see.… There is the shape of someone on the sofa by the window. Because of the light from the window behind the person and because of the flash of light still filling her own eye with reds and blacks, the face is a blur of light and dark.… Astrid blinks again and turns her back. She ignores that side of the room. (18) The technological filter impedes the meaningful intake of her surroundings. Astrid captures the failure of knowledge and meaning in the fairy-tale-like figure of “Any the Wiser,” contrived from the idiom “Nobody is any the wiser” (12). Her compulsive recordings do not create knowledge. For a number of days, she tapes dawn to determine the exact beginning of the day (7). But the recordings merely reveal her “deep anxiety about ‘true’ personal origins” (Horton, “Everything” 642; also, Breitbach 130). Her naive point of view also reveals the workings and failures of media representation, its repetitiveness, evasiveness, and emptiness of gesture, for example, when she watches a report on the death of weapons expert David Kelly: The newscasters and the people they are interviewing keep saying that a man went missing and that they have found a body, but nobody will say that the body is anything to do with the man that went missing or vice versa though it is obviously what they mean. It is something to do with the war. The prime minister comes on surrounded by cheering Americans and having his hand shaken by men in suits. After the news a woman in a tv studio talks for ages about what happened to her bowel movements since she started putting her food into special combinations. (27) The embeddedness of the war-related news in the flow of trivial images and reports underlines the absurdities of the media narrative Astrid observes.

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Only after Amber breaks Astrid’s camera, the girl begins to think about the accessibility of reality through representation versus imagination: But those people who died in those wars last century … is it the same thinking about them as it is about that … girl they found in the woodland dead last year? … Or the people who are in that war that’s supposed to be happening…. Died 2003. Astrid tries to imagine a person … in the dusty-looking places from tv, dying because of a bomb or something. She imagines Rebecca Callow on a hospital bed in a place that looks like it has no equipment. It is quite hard to imagine.… It is all everywhere all the time, … but it is hard to know how to make it actually matter inside your head. (127-128) Astrid tries to make sense of distant suffering by reimagining it and linking it to her own experiential world, an approach that again refers to the problematics of empathy addressed in Susan Sontag’s Representing the Pain of Others (Ow Yeong 9). Endlessly deferring her own physical pain (Breitbach 128), however, Astrid experiences even her own body’s reality only through Amber who slips into her bed at night, embracing her. The affection-starved girl is oblivious to the connotations of abuse. For her, this is “happiness” (135). In Magnus’s story war is linked to his personal guilt. At school, he assisted in photoshopping school mate Catherine Masson’s face onto a pornographic image, a digital manipulation that reshapes reality: “Even though it was a lie it became true” (39; also, Breitbach 136)—and Catherine killed herself. From then on, the image of the insubstantial “Hologram Boy” signifies for Magnus his former, innocent self, while he experiences his knowing, guilty self as “massive” (38). What is more, Catherine’s death is linked to reports on the death of David Kelly. In both cases, media representation wrecks the individual’s integrity, a violation that spreads to the world of Magnus. Before the incident, life had been calculable, “[n]eatly packed into mathematical operations,” and war in Iraq a question of “order vs chaos” (50). Only his adolescent sexual preoccupations superseded his preference for order (war); only because of popular Anna Leto, he took part in the antiwar demonstrations. But after the incident, the order of “signifier and signified” is suspended (Breitbach 133). The guilty image of the manipulated photo represses his sexual phantasies about girls from school and paralyses and depresses him. The appearance of Amber is another turning point for Magnus. She not only prevents his own suicide but releases him from his paralysis by fulfilling his sexual desires (Horton, “Everything” 642-643). Again, this moment of change is immediately followed by a turning point in the war. Magnus watches news reports on the death of Saddam Hussein’s sons: “It has broken the back of the war, which will be over now in a matter of weeks,” the news channel claims (147). Magnus reports how the faces of the dead men were shaved for identification, “to make them look more like they’re supposed to look, like they were when they were recognisable”

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(147). This directly reflects on his own perception of self; formerly unrecognisable (to himself) because of his guilt, he now at least assumes an appearance of his former self. Still, like him, the Hussein sons are guilty: “They were tyrants = all sorts of torturing, raping, systematic or random killings. A typical human being contains about one hundred billion neurones. A human being = a cell which divides into two then four then etc.” (147). But realising their guilt, Magnus reveals his own embeddedness in the ubiquity of human guilt, something that was absent from the news reports. In Michael’s story the “systemic” adultery (Horton, “Everything” 649) prevents any meaningful human connection or communication. Michael’s behaviour is repetitive, his arts of seduction return empty, and his conquests no longer have an “idea what he was talking about” (69). As Horton observes, he betrays a “sexual imperialism” that is linked to “the repeated imperial colonizing of Eastern territories” (“Everything” 649) and thus reflects on the empty yet destructive colonialist gesture of war in Iraq. According to Breitbach, both “Eve and Michael seem especially prone to ritually entrapping themselves in their own linguistic and literary constructions” to cover up the “painful truths about themselves” (138, 139). In the context of the War on Terror rhetoric, such linguistic fallacy further links Michael’s “patriarchal assertion” (Horton, “Everything” 649) to the position of the British at war. Amber arrests his attention and “activates a repressed desire he harbors for self-control and even humiliation” (Horton, “Everything” 643-644). In the middle section, he assumes linguistic self-control and fully resorts to verse. He reflects on the emptiness of words and links this to the political euphoria of New Labour: “It was New Labour love, then, him and Eve, / a dinner-party designer suit-andtie, / a rhetoric that was its own motif, / they believed in each other, and a lie / that was at the very centre of belief” (174). Hindsight, then, belies both the political promise and the fidelity of his relationship to Eve. New Labour’s lie, which unwinds over Blair’s insistence on the existence of WMD to justify the invasion of Iraq, first joins then separates the couple. Identifying with his homeland, Michael concludes: “He was a ruined nation, and obscene, / and nothing meant what it was meant to mean” (175). Eve also resort to a ‘lie.’ As author of the popular “Genuine interviews” (80), she writes fictional talks with people killed in World War II that leave her with the “nagging suspicion that she is a literary ‘fraud’” (Breitbach 143). At night, she anxiously imagines being exposed in an interview as insecure (Breitbach 144), self-involved, and having a sense of “unappreciated importance” (Horton, “Everything” 643). Her interviewer’s accusation that she exploits the “distasteful rise in public interest in all things Nazi and WWII … especially now that the UK was at war again” irritates her (84). The journalist-cum-novelist Adam Kellas in We Are Now Beginning Our Descent fails with a similar project. His book also capitalises on a contemporary mood with-

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out regarding the ethics of fiction, that is, “the unique power of revealing something true,” as Eve claims in The Accidental (82). When she proposes to write about something actually true, “about someone who’s alive right now, but will be dead tomorrow morning, say? In Iraq,” her publisher is worried about “market appeal” (198). Here, The Accidental self-reflexively acknowledges the problematics of fiction writing on contemporary war. Eve’s attitude towards her children reveals “the destructive impulses inherent in human nature” (Tancke, Deceptive 61), which escalate in war: What was Astrid? Poised before her own adulthood like a young deer before the head of a rose. (Deer love to eat roses.) Standing there in her too-thin legs, innocent, unsturdy, totally unaware that the future had its gunsight trained directly on her. Dark round the eyes. Kicky and impatient, blind as a kitten stupefied by all the knowing and the not-knowing. The animality of it was repulsive. (90) The repulsion she feels for Astrid is disturbing and aggressive. To justify her dislike of Magnus, she even draws explicitly on the contentious Iraq War: “a boy so strange and unfamiliar that he even announced himself … as pro the Iraq war” (91). Like her family, Eve longs for Amber’s approval. Yet, given her husband’s betrayal—a motif The Accidental shares with One of Us—she is suspicious of the other woman. Giving vent to her deep-seated aggression, she finally expels Amber when, ironically through the cruel intervention of the invader, a more cohesive, harmonious family life seems to break forth: “Michael was in the kitchen chopping food into equalsized cubes with a knife. Astrid came running through from the lounge. Magnus had opened his bedroom door and was on his way down the stairs” (202). As a gesture of taking back control, Eve “block[s] the doorway of the house” (232). But returning home to London, the family find their house robbed of all its identificatory interior. Thus, after the invasion of the holiday home, The Accidental follows up with the motif of burglary. For Astrid, it is “difficult to re-imagine” what had filled their house before (219)—and, on a figurative level, what it was that signified the family home. Realising the separation of signifier (a house) and signified (home), the burglary exposes that home in the Smart family is an empty signifier. The house becomes the stage for a new performance of home: “[It was] like we were on a stage or something because of the carpets gone…. So it was like we were walking out on to a wooden stage every time we went across a room” (257). Things formerly unthinkable become possible: Magnus opens up to Astrid about his guilt in the Catherine Masson case. But the emptiness is also disorienting: Michael loses his job (and the routine of betrayal) and shows signs of “exposure” (276), that is, hypothermia. Interestingly, the image of hypothermia is also used in We Are Now Beginning Our Descent to illustrate the disintegration of war correspondent Kellas upon his return from Afghanistan (202). The Accidental thus highlights Michael’s

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need of a home, of shelter and care: “You need to be taken to shelter … and people round you need to give you moral support” (278-279). Eve rediscovers in her encounters with Amber her buried hopes of “adventure and experience, rather than received domestic certainty” (Horton, “Everything” 643). After the burglary, Eve leaves the family. In reflection of the Abu Ghraib pictures, she begins to contemplate problematics of representation that reflect back on her own ‘authentic history fiction’ and inward aggression: “The more pictures she saw, … the more it became possible to pile real people up like that again anywhere you wanted” (285-286). She becomes a second Amber figure and invades someone else’s family home. The desensitising pictures of abuse, though they are of a very different nature, make her aware of the covert aggression of the family pictures she looks at in the unfamiliar home. Ostensibly complementing the family idyll that the upscale house conveys, these pictures reveal a break of family: the exclusion of an older son, presumably from a former marriage. Eve’s return home is questionable. Like Amber she remains detached. In the framing passages, Alhambra—the alter ego of Amber (Fischer 38)—tells the story of her own conception. She then expands her vision to locate the main narrative of family and intrusion “within the framework of a larger global history marked by change, cultural hybridity, violence and repurposing” (O’Donnell 100). Revealing the power and deceptiveness of representation, the narrative denies the exceptionality and unfamiliarity of the historical event of the Iraq War. Instead, the novel interlinks the workings of individual experience and the deception and inherent violence of British life at home with the larger sphere of war. By presenting the shifting denotation of her name from the palace and the car model to the movie theatre of her conception, Alhambra concludes the novel with an insight into the power of projection that translates onto the larger home sphere of the British at war in Iraq: “I’m everything you ever dreamed” (306). This examination of the corpus has revealed the entanglements of home and recent war in the British novel through a variety of ideas, motifs, and thematic concerns. The following chapter explores the intratextual conflation of home and war spheres through a close reading of Swift’s Wish You Were Here.

4.2.

Close-Up: Home/Fronts in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here

Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here (2011) opens with a line from William Blake’s “A Little Boy Lost.” With this epigraph, taken from the second part of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), the novel evokes the mood of disenchantment that seizes the poem’s speaker, who asks: “Are these things done on Albion’s shore?” The speaker, dismayed by the judgement passed on the boy, looks beyond his field of vision to “Albion,” Blake’s poetic version of the wider home sphere (Damon 9).

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Thus, the novel imports the poem’s idea of an estranged home community, whose judgements elude the observer’s comprehension. Blake’s evocative language suggests the instability of a “dangerous world where identity always has to be re-conquered”—an instability found across Swift’s work (Massoulier 34). In Wish You Were Here, this world forms against the backdrop of war in Iraq and the diffuse threat of global terrorism. Since selling the family farm some ten years ago, Jack Luxton, a farmer’s son from Devon, has been living “[e]xiled in modern life” (D’Erasmo) as owner of the Lookout Caravan Park on the Isle of Wight. He is “the last of the Luxtons” (6) after his brother Tom, a soldier, recently died in Iraq. The “ripple-effects of this news spreads [sic] into virtually every aspect of Jack’s life” (Kirby) and work as the “catalyst” of the narrative (Shilling). The loss of Tom adds to a number of hardships that constitute their family history. The accumulation of misfortunes in the novel creates “an atmosphere of devastation” (Lezard). Jack sets out to receive the remains of his brother at a military airbase in Oxfordshire and proceeds to their native village for the burial. This symbolic road trip (M. Barker 93) takes him from his place of residence via the airbase to rural Devon and back. The recent past of the journey and the history of the inexorable dissolution of his home and family are narrated in retrospect from Jack’s perspective while he stands unmoved at the bedroom window of his cottage on the Isle of Wight, holding out in a domestic crisis between him and his wife Ellie on “a dreadful day of catharsis” (Birch, “Wish”). Tom’s death in Iraq adds to the devastating family history and might be mistaken for just another one of those hardships—if it were not for the specific role war plays in this aggregation of grief and distress. In the novel, Marc Porée and Vanessa Guignery note, the “international theater of military operations (in Iraq, principally) … interferes with domestic wounds to further aggravate traumas” (133). War is weaved so deeply into the narrative that despite their distance the semiotic spheres of home and war conflate in Jack’s narrative. In the novel, war manifests as actual battle operations, media event and public discourse, key component of family history, and semiotic frame for the experience of domestic crisis. Tom’s death is just the most pointed manifestation of war for Jack. It is the confrontation with war that raises the central question of the novel: the question of belonging or, in Pascale Tollance’s words, rootedness (“la question de l’ancrage”; par. 2). Thus, the shapes of war cut across home on a broad scale—from the intimate space of the bedroom to nation and citizenship, even intimating a cosmopolitan perspective at times. As a result, a complex interrelation of the spheres unfolds in the novel. The novel’s formal composition is crucial for the narrative construction of home and war spheres, most prominently the aspect of perspective. The third-person narrative focalises Jack closely, prompting Bożena Kukała to describe the novel as effectively a first-person narrative:

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The use of a focaliser in … Wish You Were Here does not depart very far from the mode of first-person narration [Swift] favours; indeed it may be regarded as a variation on an unchanging concern in his fiction, i.e. a focus on a subjective consciousness engaged in the task of narrativising its experience. (117) Kukała rightly emphasises the deep insight into Jack’s thoughts, observations, and reminiscences. Readers become intimately acquainted with how he experiences and evaluates events. But the novel’s narrative mode is more complex than Kukała’s comment suggests. Though narrative focalisation always returns to Jack’s point-ofview, it also shifts to other characters: Jack’s wife Ellie, brother Tom, a condoling officer, the woman who buys Jebb Farm, a local policeman, and the hearse drivers have their say. And, occasionally, the novel even withdraws entirely from character focalisation. Moreover, Jack’s subjective perspective includes moments of “unfamiliar reality” or “estrangement” (Drobot, “The Use of the Fairy-Tale” 345). For Irina-Ana Drobot, his traumatic perception is “very much removed … from other characters’ subjective views,” isolating him in his vision of home (“The Use of the Fairy-Tale” 349). In “long hypothetical interludes” (Birch, “Wish”), described in the novel as “never-enacted scenes” (40), Jack envisions alternative outcomes of events, indulges in wishful thinking of how he should have acted, or speculates about his family history: “Something like that must have happened. Jack had never known … the actual story” (23). His idea of home is thus caught in the tension between an imagined ideal, his reminiscences, and home’s embattled reality. Tollance, who uses Michel de Certeau’s idea of non-place, highlights the dynamics between imaginary, absent spaces and the material and corporeal dimension in the novel (par. 3, 4). As a consequence, Jack is presented as unreliable. His shifts between remembering and reimagining are often diffuse. Besides, when he recounts the night of his father’s death, he withholds information (“Jack never mentioned …—was it relevant?”; 238), meddles with evidence (“he should have touched nothing, but it was what he did”; 247), is unable to consolidate inconsistent information (“But then if the shot had woken him, … he wouldn’t have heard it”; 234), and gives unnecessary explanations. In addition, the narrative suggests an alternative interpretation of the event: In his statements Jack had voluntarily made the point that when he’d spotted his father’s tracks he’d both followed and avoided them…. Of course, this meant that the descending pair of tracks might have given the appearance that the two men had walked down together.… But all this was neither here nor there…. So the policemen perhaps wondered why Jack had needed to speak about the tracks he’d seen by torchlight that were no longer there. (244-245; emphases added)

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It is possible to infer that Jack assisted his father’s suicide, especially because after shooting the old family dog Michael had stated: “And I hope one day … someone will have the decency to do the same for me” (143). The temporal organisation of Wish You Were Here is nonchronological and retrospective (Kirby); it follows Jack’s mental leaps, fragmented memory, and associations and “cycle[s] through the same events, thoughts and phrases again and again” (Charles). Allusions accumulate long before events are more openly narrated. Swift’s nonlinear storytelling follows “the workings of memory, which move from the present of the story into the past and back,” Drobot explains (“The Use of Time” 550). Only gradually, the novel reveals a more coherent story. In the few hours of the eventless present (Drobot, “The Use of Time” 552), Jack is caught up in recollections of the past home. The cottage may be his present place of residence, but his semiotic home is located elsewhere. In this fragmentary context, the home sphere unfolds. In Swift’s writings, Nathalie Massoulier observes, a traumatic symptomatology is never far off (35). In Wish You Were Here, the idea of trauma is already indicated in the subject matter of war: The repeated references to the Iraq invasion and the Great War in themselves carry associations of trauma (Luckhurst, The Trauma 51). In stories of contemporary war, such as Simon Stephens’s play Motortown (chapter 5.2.) or the television film The Mark of Cain (chapter 6.1.4.), trauma is often discussed as a pathology, that is, as PTSD. This is not the case in Wish You Were Here, despite its theme of madness and the issue of ‘mad-cow disease.’5 Instead, Jack’s trauma is the loss of crucial reference points of home, a challenge to his notion of belonging and identity. Structurally, this is reflected in the use of established modes of narrating the traumatic: a disrupted temporal order and fragmented narrative (Luckhurst, The Trauma 88, 81), the uncontrolled and incomplete access to memory (Hunt 68-71), and the occurrence of ghosts and spectral phenomena (Kirss 25). These properties are to be found not only in Jack’s fragmentary recollections, often triggered by incidental cues, but also in the haunting presence of the revenant brother. For Jack, telling his story of home and family is a therapeutic working through, a coming-to-terms with his troubled relation to home. The processes of remembering and drawing links between events and ideas restructure his memory into newly meaningful patterns (Hunt 78-79). More than once, he asks whether “[p]eople could help by dying” (60). The novel thus addresses his traumatic suffering and probes the possibility to renarrate grief and hardship in progressive terms: carrying on after and even benefitting from traumatic crises. To this end, Wish You Were Here explores different ways to shape meaning at the intersection of home and war. Starting with 5

For Bruno Latour, both trauma and mad-cow disease are “hybrid assemblages”: Located “between the natural and the man-made,” they mix “questions of science, law, technology, capitalism, politics, medicine and risk” (Luckhurst, The Trauma 14-15).

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the protagonist’s family, sub-semiospheres come into contact with war, exchange takes place, and ultimately new meaning is introduced to the home sphere.

Origins: The Family Home In the narrative present of Wish You Were Here, Jack has been living on the Isle of Wight for more than ten years. Although he no longer leads a farmer’s life, in his mind, home is still Jebb Farm in rural Marleston, where he was born and raised. This rural home sphere is still vibrantly present for Jack: But he can see it, now: the steep drop away from the farmhouse, the full-summer crown of the oak tree. The hills beyond. The exact lines of hedgerows and of tracks running between the gates in them. White dots of sheep, brown and black-andwhite dots of cattle. For a moment, … he can even smell the land, the breath of the land. The thick, sweaty smell of a hayfield. The dry, baked smell of cooling stubble on an August evening. Smells he never smelt at the time. The smell of cow dung mingling with earth, the cheapest, lowliest of smells, but the best. Who wouldn’t wish for that as their birthright and their last living breath? (74) The passage invokes a nostalgic image of the English countryside—at once earthy, emotional, and synaesthetic. Andrew Walker explains that “the romanticisation of the rural formed a recurring motif throughout much of the cultural output of laternineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain” (106; also, S. Hall 122). And for Dominic Head, Wish You Were Here is “a complex literary celebration of the rural” that evokes “the haunted nostalgia of interwar rural fiction,” a nostalgia set against a modernity of “intensive farming and international warfare” (“Mapping” 22). In contrast to this focus on nostalgia, Tollance argues: Il n’est point ici question de nostalgie mais bien de hantise, et alors même que les lieux manifestent leur emprise sur ceux qui les ont occupés, ils semblent résister à toute appropriation, perdus pour toujours, et d’une certaine façon, depuis toujours. (Par. 2) For Tollance, a fearful obsession (“hantise”) rather than nostalgia binds the protagonist to a home space always already lost. The violent uprooting (“déracinement”) of Jack has a belated traumatic effect, Tollance argues (par. 2). Jack’s rural home is particularly British because it is a dairy farm that depends on livestock. Stephen J.G. Hall argues that in Britain specific breeds can mark familial or local identity (125); and Alison Moore links the “British rural” directly to what she calls the “bovine bearer of rural meaning” (168): [T]he rural conceived through the cow-in-field icon arguably represents in the UK a uniquely British rural in the public psyche…. Thus, we see the power of this im-

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age: although … it is a residual element in the dominant culture, deployed as a rhetorical device, the British public view it as a vital part of their rural future. (168) That the association of the rural with grazing cattle is particularly strong in the British imagination places the Luxtons at the heart of rural Britain.6 The BSE crisis becomes a particularly traumatic moment. Jack is haunted by the memory of the culling and burning of their cattle. The crisis generates two semiotic fields that create interconnections across the narrative: The first is madness, which links the rural home to the present-day marital crisis: “There is no end to madness, Jack thinks, once it takes hold. Hadn’t those experts said it could take years before it flared up in human beings? So, it had flared up now in him and Ellie” (1). The second is the image of smoke on the horizon, which connects the devastating events of the family history: Ce dont la fumée est l’indice ne cesse de se transformer au fil du roman, mais c’est surtout comme image que cette fumée s’impose dans sa fixité et son insistance—image de tout ce qui est à la fois voué à disparaître et se refuse à disparaître. (Tollance par. 7). The image of rising smoke acquires a haunting quality in the novel because, against its fleeting nature, it never seems to dissolve. According to Head, Wish You Were Here self-reflexively reworks traditional rural motifs, such as “the son leaving the farm for war; the catastrophic fire; the hallowed place,” and sets them against “an implacable and homogenising historical moment” that “displaces regional self-consciousness” (“Mapping” 22): the current war in Iraq. Jack clings to his rural family home for identification. But home in the novel extends over various layers, extending vertically—including individual, familial, communal, and national homes—as well as horizontally—that is, home relating to different categories, such as space, social organisation and function, social recognition, history and myth. Wish You Were Here makes use of the key trope of the family in literary depictions of rurality. Rupert Hildyard writes that “the farm text … provides, within its protective shell against the outer world, a fantasy of authentic relationship and community—the ‘family,’” an ideal that rests on “relations of mutuality, intimacy and affection in contrast to the impersonal forces of competition and struggle that rule outside” (142). It is not the taciturn, emotionally inhibited father Michael but mother Vera who evokes this family spirit. She is the centre of the Luxton identity. With her death, the family seems to dissolve:

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In the television series Occupation, the homeland is also visually introduced through the cowin-field icon which is set against the desolate Iraqi landscape (chapter 6.2.).

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She was more of a Luxton, it could be said, than the Luxtons themselves. When she died it was as if the whole pattern was lost. Yet her name had once been Newcombe, and until she was nineteen she’d never even known life on a farm. (23) Here, Jack acknowledges that family identity depends on performance, on upholding a narrative of home rather than on genealogy. Not a Luxton by birth, Vera still passes on the ‘foundation myth’ of family identity: the story of two earlier Luxton brothers, George and Fred, who died at the front in World War I. By telling the story to her son, the mother creates the moment of Jack’s initiation into the family; it is, in his own words, a “rite of passage” (12). But the narrative also challenges this story: “there wasn’t so much to go on … though the story had become, quite literally, engraved, no one had ever completely possessed the facts” (9). As it turns out, George’s Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) was awarded for an act of bravery of either him or Fred. Their captain, unable to tell them apart in the turmoil of war, chose George on the thin grounds of his “more patriotic name” (10). What is more, Vera adds an epilogue of selflessness and family spirit to the story, “shaping it as she thought fit” (9). In her version, the brothers return alive and, at the gate to the farm, agree to share the glory of the medal. This addendum is later reenacted by her sons: Returning from hunting one day, Tom shares his quarry with Jack “before the farmhouse came into view” (100). The arrangement confirms Vera’s identity-establishing supplement and honours its principle of solidarity. But this idea of an ‘authentic family community’ is Vera’s contrivance and fades with her death. Eventually, the brothers will be separated when Tom leaves the farm to find a surrogate family in the military: “It would soon be the army’s job to clothe, feed and house him” (182). Still, Vera’s epilogue provides a template for the never-enacted scenes of Jack’s imagination. Both mother and son reimagine family history by blurring fact and fiction. Daniel Weston, referring not only but also to Wish You Were Here, writes that “the uncertainty of memory and the falsity of narratives of self are the novel’s subject matter and central to its plot” (183). This uncertainty impacts on the reflection on and reconceptualisation of ideas of home and self. Breaking up “linear, progressive time and thus … relationships of cause and effect,” the novel invites “the reader … to participate in a reconstruction of the story by rebuilding the relationships of cause and effect and by putting incidents in chronological order,” Drobot writes (“The Use of Time” 550). In Wish You Were Here, the reader must decide which narratives to trust and how to read Jack’s interpretative interjections. George’s medal is the central material signifier in Vera’s family narrative. As a semiotic marker of the Luxton identity, it is kept in the innermost space of the family home: the master bedroom of the farmhouse. Still, in the same location Vera dies painfully, refusing to leave the farm and go to hospital: “As if she were putting down her final roots” (24). Family identity is thus also spatially linked to the

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beginning of the family’s disintegration. Part of the arrangement of the bedroom is “an old-fashioned wooden cradle … and there was no saying how many Luxtons had been rocked in it. Those two Luxton lads on the war memorial, surely” (103104). Because of the family’s history, war is always already present in this family home—even before the contemporary conflict in Iraq takes its toll. Beyond bedroom and farmhouse, the geography of Jebb Farm includes the transit or border zones of the driveway and gate. The narrative repeatedly defines the gate as a point of no return: “And if [Jack had] grasped that decision as he’d grasped and swung that gate—for God’s sake, if he’d just bought his father a bloody pint—how different the consequences might have been” (232).7 What Jack regrets in this passage is his failure to prevent the suicide of his father, who tellingly ignored his annual Remembrance Day visit to the pub on this last occasion. Once they cross the border back onto the family property, it is too late to prevent the further disruption of the family. Shortly after, the father dies under the old oak in Barton Field, a portentous piece of farmland sloping down from the house. The tree’s impressive shadow marks a location of displacement where many of those events take place that mark the family’s dissolution. Here, Michael shoots the ailing family dog Luke, prompting Tom to leave home as soon as he is of age. Tom dies in Iraq, but even his death is linked to the tree when Jack wonders if Tom’s coffin is made of English oak (269). The father’s suicide in this place leaves a mark in the massive trunk—and, figuratively speaking, on Jack. Indeed, the English oak is an emblem of Jack: Of massive stature and deeply rooted in home soil, he is as scarred and haunted as the tree (Grant). The ghosts of the past can be sensed by the later owners, the Robinsons: During a picnic under the tree, Clare Robinson has a sudden presentiment that “something was very wrong” (323). She describes the oak as “sinister rather than glorious” (324), and her words also ring true for Jack’s attachment to a home based on a tale of wartime glory that turns into a dark omen for his soldier brother.

Rites of Belonging: The Communal Home Beyond the farm lies the communal home sphere of Marleston. Village life in the novel appears mainly in Jack’s reminiscences of Remembrance Days with their “hallowed meaning for the Luxton family” (15): Though Jebb Farm lies in the periphery of the village, family history places the Luxtons at the semiotic centre of communal life when, once a year, the community commemorates the war dead. The story of George and Fred, whose names are engraved on the war memorial, constitutes the

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Jack also refers to the gate when he leaves to move to the Isle of Wight (329) and when he thinks of Tom’s departure: “Three hundred paces, his heart thumping, breath smoking. Then the gate. [Jack] counted him up the track and pictured him swinging quickly over the gate—there’d be no opening it. Dropping his pack over first” (186-187).

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family’s social identity: George is “the Luxtons’ claim to fame” (12). They honour their “annual duty” (230) of representing the war hero to promote communal cohesion: “George Luxton and his DCM were in fact the reason why … many residents of Marleston village and its vicinity turned up in November with their poppies when otherwise they might not have done” (11). Afterwards, the father performs his own ritual of family identity in the village: He stands a round of pints in the local pub and awkwardly allows his neighbours a rare glimpse at the medal. The mother’s death changes the Remembrance Day traditions. Now, the men “stand by [her grave] for a moment, wearing their poppies, as if she too might have been mown down on the Somme” (14). In this addition to the yearly performance of family, the old war acquires new meaning and the annual ritual a new urgency. In turn, the ritualised affirmation of the disruption caused by the Great War comes to signify the ineffable loss of the mother. A second change in the family marks the end of their attendance altogether: On Remembrance Day 1994, only Jack and his father are left to attend “for the simple but, on such a day, highly complicated reason that [Tom] was in the army” (13). His younger son’s absence causes Michael to suspend his annual pub visit and thus his already scanty contribution to the narrative of family. With his suicide hours later, he puts into practice what he already signified through the missed pint: the further disintegration of the family. In Jack’s memories of this last Remembrance Day, the communal rural home, challenged by the BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics, is measured against war. The code of war is translated for the home sphere and used to render conceivable and meaningful the present condition of the community: Over the others gathered by the memorial there hung, too, an awkwardness or an extra sombreness … that owed something to Tom’s absence, but just as much to the devastations that had visited the region’s farms in recent years—to the war still rumbling on, though the thing had passed its peak, with the cow disease. In many respects, the after-effects were as bad as the outbreak itself. While officials blathered about recovery and ‘declining incidence’, the human toll was mounting. Perhaps everyone did their best, as every year, to picture for a moment the indescribable battlefields on which those Luxton brothers and others had died, but what came more readily to mind were the cullings and slaughterings of recent times and the grief and hardship they were still causing. (14) In this passage, war is juxtaposed with the agricultural crisis at home: The “battlefields” contrast with an epidemic past its peak. The crises differ in their semiotic status in the community: War, framed by the language of the commemorative ritual, has become “verbally accessible memory,” Nigel C. Hunt observes (70). The notion of traumatic unrepresentability, echoed in the “indescribable battlefields,” does not suspend representation but signifies war’s severity and scale and the struggle to “integrate the events one has lived through into one’s structure of experience”

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(Laanes 124). The meaning of the domestic crisis, on the other hand, has yet to be determined. The official representation clearly fails to capture the deep impact on the community. The deferred reaction (“after-effects”) of the increased suicide rate in the village (“the human toll”) reveals the traumatic, unprocessed status of the crisis. In other words, the domestic crisis is so far only “situationally accessible memory,” waiting to be verbalised and embedded in narrative to be conceivable (Hunt 70-71). Despite this juxtaposition of war and farming crisis, the border between the spheres is also transcended in the passage. The contemporary experience of war works as a bridge connecting the abstract commemoration of war and the villager’s experience of existential threat: The absence of Tom, who both serves in the war and bears the name of Luxton, is “just as much” the reason for the gloomy atmosphere as the effects of the cow disease. By comparing the two contemporary experiences, the passage translates the language of war into a terminology for the domestic crisis, which becomes “the war still rumbling on.” War is explored as a semiotic template to integrate crisis into the narrative of the community. And the semiotics of the industrial scale of the Great War—the indescribability, the sombreness, the commemorative rituals to cope with the loss of human life—are offered to signify, frame, and contain the devastating experience of the BSE crisis in the imagination of the agricultural community.

Alternative Homes: Holiday Spaces Originally, Jack’s world is limited by the undulating horizon of his rural home. Trips beyond are scarce: “Even the Isle of Wight, once, would have seemed like going abroad,” Jack notes (56). Ten years ago, however, Jack relocated to the Isle of Wight. This is a move across internal borders of the homeland, initiated by his wife Ellie, the daughter of neighbour Merrick. Their fathers die within a short period of time, and Ellie presents Jack with a full-blown plan to sell the farms and buy the Caravan Park. The new residence in the geographic margins of Britain is, for Jack, also semiotically peripheral—this is a place “he doesn’t quite consider England” (Robson). It is a heterotopic space that both mirrors and reverses the logics of the farm home. For Michel Foucault, heterotopias are real and effective spaces which … constitute a sort of counter arrangement, of effectively realized utopia, in which all the real arrangements, all the other real arrangements that can be found within society, are at one and the same time represented, challenged, and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable. (332)

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The cottage’s bedroom, where Jack stands looking at the tempestuous8 landscape, is such a double that links to the bedroom at Jebb Farm; and the Caravan site mirrors the village community on a small scale. The caravans tremble in the storm as the farming community trembled in the economic crisis: “He looks at the caravans and even now feels their tug, like the tug of the wind on their own thin, juddering frames. Thirty-two trembling units” (7). Beyond these analogies, the new residence is, in the Foucauldian sense, also a space of deviance (Foucault 333). Jack realises that he has “become the proprietor of the very opposite thing to that deep-rooted farmhouse” (29; also, Tollance par. 6). The holiday place is marked by idleness and unproductivity, suspending the work so essential of the farming existence. The Caravan Park, “entirely set aside for the purpose of holidays” (149), realises the utopia of recreation and thus indicates “time in its more futile, transitory and precarious aspects” (Foucault 335): “Empty half the year…. Occupied for the other half by this shifting temporary population—migrants, vagrants, escapers in their own country” (30). Foucault’s examples of the fun fair and the holiday village as heterotopic spaces (335) also indicate that Jack’s current existence—“Fun being what they dealt in” (29)—is the ‘other’ home. What alienates Jack from this place is the fact that it overturns his notion of home, most prominently in its lack of productive labour. In representations of farm live, Hildyard observes, work is usually narrated as self-actualising and essential to the formation of identity (142). Hildyard elaborates: Much of the appeal and resonance of the farm text must be that in some sense readers (perhaps rightly) feel that working all at once with our hands, with animals, with machinery, with plants, the soil and the weather is profoundly authentic and connected in a way or to an extent that other work or practices do not. (143) On the island, Jack is still the “out-of-work farmer,” though he is anything but unsuccessful in his new profession: “He’d risen to that task: talking to the caravanners, making them feel at home and befriended. He’d been surprised at his talent for it” (27). But he is still entrenched in his former home. His attempts to rethink his campsite profession in terms of work life on the farm—“milking his caravans” (28) or “tending a herd of caravans” (26)—bear witness to the discrepancy of his imagined and lived home spaces. Though on the Isle of Wight Jack is “a far cry from … hosing down the milking parlour” (28), he does not shift the semiospheric centre of his home. What remains

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For Nathalie Massoulier, the weather, which reflects Jack’s inner turmoil, also indicates a sense of the sublime—“relating to the common Burkean notions of awe, terror and delight as negative pain … but defined as becoming transfixed or as fearing transfixion” (37). In the ‘landscape of pain’ that is his life, Jack is controlled by this transfixing effect.

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is a home deprived of its geography and transposed into an imaginary, utopian realm—a memory of home without a fixed location. And there is no way back: The farm, too, is converted into a place of leisure, illustrating how the countryside becomes more and more detached from agricultural associations (S. Hall 122). For the Robinsons, a family from the city, Jebb Farm is a weekend home. Jack laments: “To see it now, not a Luxton in sight, its acres all in new hands and the farmhouse no longer a farmhouse. A country home, a ‘holiday home’ … for people who already had a home” (28). The Robinsons, “settling into a strange land,” live their own Robinsonade in this place (Hildyard 142). But this is not a “hopeful narrative of progressive establishment of an (illusory) secure and comfortable settlement,” as in the generic farm text of the first half of the twentieth century (Hildyard 142). On the contrary, the Robinson family is a fragile formation: Clare Robinson reluctantly notes that her husband’s affair is not “just a temporary toying” and that their “marriage was really a rather flimsy, unlovely affair” (309). The foundation of the urban family seeking the idyll of the countryside is as shaken as that of the farmer. The families are not just linked by the location of Jebb Farm, their tie also manifests on a spiritual level in the sinister premonitions that seize Clare under the oak tree. In this interconnectedness across time, home breaks free of its individual significance. The link creates an imagined home community across the Luxton-Robinson divide, affecting and including the individual. After leaving the farm, Jack lives and moves in holiday spaces, but his attitude towards these spaces of pleasure and diversion remains detached: “[The Caravan Park] could sometimes be like a circus. Entertaining, raucous, a touch of danger” (73). Jack is conscious about playing a role: “You had to be a bit of a policeman sometimes. You had to be their smiling host in a joke of a shirt, but there were times when you had to show them who was in charge” (73). The context of 9/11 affects his perspective: Though initially he assures himself that “we should be all right here. Here at the bottom of the Isle of Wight” (3-4), the compulsive repetition of the images induces him “to look down at the site, as if half expecting everything to have vanished” (4). Now, drawing on the semiotic field of the military, he sees himself as the “Commandant” and the holiday site as a war zone: “It was only ever an encampment down there … like the halt of some expeditionary, ragtag army. It might all be gone in the morning—any morning—leaving nothing but the tyre marks in the grass” (30). And Jack speculates about the possibility that the site might become a target for the terrorists (61). The Lookout suddenly turns into a space of insecurity, a home space to be protected. Even during his own winter holidays, Jack worries about the security firm that guards the site (27). At Jebb Farm, the Robinsons are also concerned about security; they consult the local policeman, Bob Ireton. Though economic insecurity is not unknown to the rural community, especially since the epidemic, the policeman sees a new compul-

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sory, abstract feeling of insecurity that invades the local and rural from outside, a fearfulness bred in urban space and beyond: Bob Ireton might have said it was something the Robinsons brought with them from London … something that, like those cow diseases, was now just spreading through the air. The feeling that nowhere was really immune, even quiet green places in the depths of the country.… Bob had begun to feel that his safe little job as a country policeman … was actually bound up, as if he might be involved in some latent war, with a larger, unlocal malaise of insecurity. And he’d felt this particularly, like a palpable burden and responsibility, when he’d offered his shoulder to help carry Jack Luxton’s poor dead brother. (312-313) For Bob, the reality of Tom’s war death appears as a manifestation of the impalpable insecurity that seizes the homeland. The novel’s title refers to a line from a postcard Jack send to Ellie from a childhood camping holiday with his mother and Tom: “Wish you were here” (63). In the novel, the phrase takes on significance to express a longing for home and the intimate community of family that different characters in the novel feel, as Tollance writes: “le récit nous permet de mettre différents visages à différents moments du temps derrière le ‘You’ qui, sur la carte postale, désignait Ellie—y compris le visage de la mère qui avait soufflé les mots à Jack” (par. 11). For Ellie, the postcard rather signifies Jack’s intimate relation to his brother and prompts a jealousy prevailing beyond Tom’s death. Passages that focalise her underline this rivalry between Jack’s original family and his partnership with Ellie. As if Jack was inwardly still at the farm waiting for his brother to return, Tom’s absence stands between Jack and Ellie. Jack’s memory of his winter holidays in the Caribbean is troubled by a sudden irruption of war when he receives the letter that Tom died in Iraq. At once, the exotic landscape of St Lucia is superimposed with an image of Basra: “Palm trees there too” (56). Jack compares his carefree ride strapped to a parachute above the beach, for which Ellie calls him a “hero” (58), with ‘war hero’ Tom’s more serious purpose in the similarly exotic location of Iraq: He could see that the resort, with its bright greens and blues, was like an island on the edge of an island. Somewhere in the distance there were slants of smoke. They were burning crop waste maybe. And all the time he would have been floating up there and all the time he and Ellie would have been lying there in the hot sun at the Sapphire Bay, thinking of chilled champagne for heroes at dinner, Tom would have been in the hot sun, in Iraq. (58-59) In Jack’s imagination, distant places blend: The holiday location, the Caravan Park (another recreational ‘island’ on the edge of an island), the farm home (suggested by the burning crop waste), and the Iraqi battlegrounds ‘conflagrate’ all at once in the image of the smoke. Jack becomes acutely aware of the discord of being on

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holiday when elsewhere war is in progress—that is, war in the rural home sphere as well as on a global scale. Contemporary war thus enters Jack’s experiential realm forcefully and impinges on the home. The War on Terror inescapably seizes his perception of the Caravan Park, and the imagery of the war in Iraq powerfully controls Jack’s perception of the more distant Caribbean holiday place. Notwithstanding, the process of superimposition works both ways, most impressively for Tom who exchanges his family home for a military one.

A Place of Refuge: Belonging and the Military Through the deaths of mother Vera, the dog, and the livestock the Luxton home is unravelling rapidly. The next to leave this “ghost farm” (42) is Tom. He joins the army, confirming “the deep bond between the farm that binds and the barracks that frees” (Tonkin). In fact, he begs: “Take me in, please, sort me out please” (204). It is “the complete alternative package” to his former life (203). In the army, he is the “big brother” (207), barking at his subordinates, and the mother: “He could do that too.… Sew on a button for them just like his own mum had done. Bite off the cotton. There you are, Pickering. Now say thank you’” (205). It is the role he had taken on at Jebb Farm after Vera died: “But Tom was even better … at taking her place, at being, for them all, a bit of a mum himself. Was that something the army required of a man too?” (43). But unlike Vera, who had insisted on holidays for her boys against her husband’s opposition, Tom failed to take a stand against his father on behalf of the dog—“perhaps it was then, on that morning when that shot rang out in Barton Field, that the madness had really set in” (152). For Tom, this frustration is like “a disease … starting to eat away at him,” a sickness transmitted by his father (199200). His new home contains and controls his deep-seated resentment: “The army welcomed anger. Was happy to channel and redirect it, even, maybe, cure it” (206). His repressed aggression threatens the family home, while in the military the use of force is the received mode of action: A war on terror? That sounded like an open day for enemies, that sounded like a perfect opportunity for firing off lots of cool, disciplined, single rounds of anger. The first time he’d fired for real and seen his man drop, he’d felt anger fly out of him, he’d felt a great whoosh of sanity and calmness. Now he’d done it. (206) At home, violence leads to a dissolution of identity (madness)—but at war, violence maintains a coherent (sane) identity. In contrast to a farming existence, being a soldier implies a nonsedentary way of living; and Tom not only leaves the farm but also the homeland to go to Bosnia and Germany. For Jack at home, Tom’s whereabouts remain elusive: “No, he didn’t know where Tom was.… Tom was in the army and who could say where the army was? Catterick? Salisbury Plain?” (42-43). Communication between the brothers is

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suspended. None of Jack’s letters elicit any reply from Tom; it “was like sending a letter to the North Pole” (76), an illusive, surreal space. And yet, across the civilianmilitary divide, the brothers are linked by the War on Terror. Both reflect on the terrorism discourse that frames war in Iraq, in particular the semantic tension of terror as a feeling versus terrorism as the strategic use of violence (60-61): “Was this terror? The thing they were fighting?” Tom asks (208). And both struggle with the aloofness of the term. For Jack, the impact of global terrorism on his remote seaside life is an absurdity as well as a concern. Tom, however, sees the War on Terror as an ideal pretext to release bottled-up emotions—for himself but perhaps also for the nation. The Iraqi enemies never take shape nor are their motivations of any relevance to Tom. Fatally wounded, he feels the messy death by an IED to be “unfair,” but he places no blame on the enemy and simply concludes that “there was nothing he could do about it” (207). Thus, even when terror strikes in the form of the roadside bomb, Tom does not feel terror. This tension inherent in the hazy terminology of the War on Terror points to the struggle to grasp the reality of war. The invisible enemy of contemporary asymmetric warfare is doubled in the imperceptible enemy in the domestic crisis: the pathogenic agent of BSE. The latter is not only invisible but might even be nonexistent: “Healthy cattle. Sound of limb and udder and hoof—and mind” (1). Evoking the image of cattle in the context of war calls to mind Wilfred Owen’s 1917 poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” which mourns the countless deaths on the battlefields of World War I (Kirby). Such interlacing of domestic and war spheres multiplies in Tom’s experience of the military. His upbringing prepares him for a soldier’s existence, not only in terms of housekeeping and hunting skills. Tom reverses the strategy to understand home through the semiotic system of war and draws on his experience of farm life in distress to cope with the violence of the battlefield: Dying, he imagines himself lying peacefully “in Barton Field more or less where Luke had been shot” (209), the place signalling the end of his sense of belonging to the Luxton home. In his mind, he returns to and takes comfort in an idealised rural home epitomised in the “soft rip-rip of cows’ mouths tearing up grass” (209). Tom’s body is then returned to the rural home to be buried in Marleston. For Jack, Tom is thus reunited with his family: “Tom’s with her [Vera] right now, Jack thinks, he could scarcely be closer. He was walking right back to her, that night [of his escape], without knowing it” (28-29). And as a ghost that haunts Jack, Tom also overcomes the separation of the brothers in spirit.

The Journey: Rethinking Home Since relocating to the island, Jack had never adjusted his idea of home to his new residence. His physical journey now effects a change towards a new understanding of home (Tollance par. 2). It takes him across the semiotic subspheres of British

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life and culture—civil and military, familiar and unfamiliar spaces, home across different scales—and demonstrates the exchange between spheres that introduces new meaning to the idea of home. Transit zones in particular, like the ferry, the service stations, and the hotel, signal processes of transfer. Both the reason for his journey and the destination of the airbase are, in semiotic terms, associated with war. Thus, it is through war that he comes to think about home from a new perspective. Jack leaves the island and steps onto unfamiliar terrain: “The Isle of Wight to Oxfordshire: it was unknown country to him. Like the Isle of Wight once had been. Never mind the bloody isle of St Lucia. It was all unknown country now” (132). Still, what alienates him is not the particular geography but what it signifies: “The ferry crossing was fearful in itself, but it also went, when travelling in this direction, with a queasy distrust of the looming mainland—that yet contained his roots and his past” (135). These associations exceed the level of physical space or geography: “In preparing himself for the other immensities of this journey, he had over-allowed for its simple distance” (148). In this context, Jack falls back on his family’s warrelated history. In his breast pocket, “almost against his skin” (133), he carries the medal. Throughout the trip, he is acutely aware of its presence. In fact, the medal is the main signifier of Jack’s preoccupation with his idea of home on his journey: “He didn’t dare not have [the medal] about his person. It was like carrying a key” (223). He frequently pulls it out of one pocket to place it in another. And he touches it for reassurance when he first approaches the mainland, which he experiences as a ferocious animal, noting how “the ferry slid through the jaws of the harbour” (136). A number of old war ships mark this mainland further as hostile, war-imprinted territory. The trip challenges Jack on a level he rarely acknowledges, because it is rather associated with urban space, namely his British citizenship: Portsmouth was not the biggest of cities, but it was more than big enough for Jack…. The word ‘city’ itself was foreign to him, as was the word ‘citizen’, though that second word, he somehow appreciated too, hung, almost like its explanation, over this journey. (145-146) In this context, Jack uneasily acknowledges his citizenship, his belonging on a national scale. His passport identifies him, but he still fears to be arrested. His feelings of illegitimacy are strongest in the city, and he is eager to get to the open country. But the escape is illusive. At the next service station, he is again surrounded by a “random sample of the nation” (148). The occasion of Jack’s trip may be extraordinary compared to the assumed mundane purposes of the other travellers, but he expects them to be “feeding their own little balls of fear” just like himself: “This was peacetime in the middle of England. But there was a war on terror” (149). Fear in the context of citizenship and nationhood signifies the post-9/11 culture of anxiety.

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Jack’s next stop is the airbase. To make sense of the unknown military sphere, he uses the ideas of city and airport—both unhomely places he has experienced before. He discards the pastoral associations of the word “‘airfield’, suggesting something grassy and forgotten,” and describes the airbase “in the centre of England” as “a hub, … seriously and constantly busy” (157). In his attempt to grasp the military sphere, he identifies its differences from the consulted models. Its seriousness of purpose, for instance, contradicts the recreational associations of the airport—“none of [the base’s] manifest and elaborate purposefulness had to do with the taking of holidays” (158). With each checkpoint that takes him deeper into military space, Jack’s control of his own person is reduced: “From then on Jack was like a puppet, a lost man” and is “somehow sucked into” this sphere (160). He notices the other “clusters of civilians” waiting for the ceremony and, torn between familiarity and alienation, feels “both a solidarity and a dreadful, shaming isolation, that his cluster was just him” (161). As a group, the civilians are the inferior antipole to the looming presence of war marked by the immense cargo aircraft towering over the repatriation ceremony. Here, the border between war and home is at its most permeable, providing an entryway for war into the homeland: “It was a big plane, for three coffins. It stood there … under a dappled, grey-and-white, autumnal sky in Oxfordshire. It must have stood not so long ago on a tarmac in Iraq” (162). The presence of war is so pressing that Jack imagines how it completely engulfs the civilian sphere: There was … the sense … of being on the edge of something huge and remorseless. As if, though this was Oxfordshire, war was being waged only just over the skyline. At ground level, the plane now looked vast, and, with its cavernous rear opening directed at the onlookers …, it seemed to Jack that it might be there not to unload, but to gather everyone up. The climax of this event might be when they were all … scooped up into the big, dark hold and taken off to Iraq. (166) The passage urgently and tangibly evokes the impact of the ongoing war on the British homeland. And the military area serves as an intermediary space where home and war meet. While aspects of war were always already part of Jack’s notion of home, those elements were mediated: In the story of George and Fred, for instance, war was contained in a hero narrative and its threatening potential downplayed. On the base, the presence of war is a different one: immediate and allencompassing. War is represented as enormous and overpowering, like the “cavernous rear opening” of the plane, or described as threatening, like the celebratory rifle shots that “came like jolts” and cause the relatives to “buckle, as if they were being fired at themselves” (171). Jack cannot elude this atmosphere during the ceremony. The military order of events spreads to Jack’s perception and behaviour:

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When the drum began, Jack felt it was being struck inside his chest, and … he couldn’t prevent his arms going stiff at his sides, the thumbs pointing downwards, … lifting his chin and pulling back his shoulders and coming to an instinctive, irresistible attention. (168) The cadence of the military instrument has a noticeable effect on Jack and calls up memories of Tom that “flow through him in a way he couldn’t have predicted, willed or even wished” (169). Past, present, and future commemoration ceremonials merge in his mind: During the repatriation procedure, he remembers bygone funerals and Remembrance Day ceremonies back home and anticipates the upcoming burial of his brother. For the process of sensemaking of his wartime loss, the contact of civilian, military, and war spheres is instigated here but not resolved. The present location is, for Jack, both alike and different from the remembered and anticipated home spaces of Marleston—“like this—though it wasn’t like this at all” (169). Just as Jack’s uncompleted physical journey, his mental journey is ongoing. To reconcile past and present experience, he compares the military ceremonial with rituals he remembers from Marleston. He tests the old patterns in his imaginary funeral speech: referring to the decorated ancestors and showing off the medal for effect like his father on Remembrance Days. But these old patterns prove insufficient, and he longs to participate in the new proceedings in front of him: “[Jack] wanted … to be one of the six bare-headed soldiers [that carry his brother’s coffin] or somehow all of them” (170). For Jack, the military ceremony hovers between being a novelty and being self-evident: He realises that “the three drivers of the hearses were not (of course) alone”; he wonders, poses questions, is surprised but also sees “part of the proceedings … like a natural, inevitable response” (171, 170). The strict military ceremonial is a contrast to the disorganised reaction of the relatives afterwards. The army personnel stand back as the families approach the hearses in “an impetuous, almost mutinous surge against military rule” (171-172). Military order may still have a hold on Jack when he tips the hearse drivers as if he were awarding them a medal. But gradually, the military recedes: The Union Jack on Tom’s coffin, the ultimate sign of his national belonging, is removed. What remains is “the bare wood” (173), which elsewhere Jack links to domestic English oak, marking the return of the dead soldier as a homecoming. Quickly, Jack leaves, striding towards the “unceremonial world of car parks” (176). Back in his car—a mobilised version of home (Tollance par. 2)—he crosses the check points back into the “semi-military,” “camp-like town” (193, 176) outside of the airbase. Further out, on the road, he begins to feel haunted by the hearse. He pulls over “somewhere in the unknown heart of England” (177); the restraints of the military space on the emotional impact of Tom’s death are repealed and desperation finally takes hold of him.

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The Revenant Brother: Confronting War The formal reception of Tom’s body in the repatriation, his literal return to the ‘land of his fathers’ (patria), challenges Jack’s uneasy relation to the home sphere. His desire for the family home had, since the death of the father and the selling of the farm, only been possible as a reunion of the brothers: And wasn’t the last thing he’d wanted … for Tom to show his face again? Jack could see all this even as he … had the briefest but clearest picture of Tom standing right there, in the doorway of Lookout Cottage, grinning and looking bigger than he used to be. In a soldier’s uniform. Anyone at home? The last thing he’d wanted? No. (80) Tom’s death rules out an actual reunion and enforces the traumatic loss of home. The novel therefore resorts to the image of the ghost: Tom, dressed in battle-gear, haunts Jack on several occasions between the repatriation and the burial ceremonies. The moments are brief; the ghost remains silent. And at first, Jack wonders if he is going mad. Soon, however, he comes to expect and desire the appearances of Tom’s spirit. Still, the idea of haunting exceeds the subjective perspective of the protagonist: Ghosts from the past pervade the novel’s narrative. In fact, Ellie announces Tom’s eerie return, thinking that “Tom wasn’t coming back, yet he was coming back. So far as Jack was concerned, he was coming back big-time. He was coming back to bloody haunt them” (116-117). Derek and Dave, the undertakers who drive the coffin to Marleston, also sense the “special company” (194) of the spectral presence. The dead body, the representative of their homeland’s involvement in the war, occupies their minds when they are on the road: “It had come out of that plane, it had been flown all the way from Iraq. It? Now it was nudging … at their shoulders” (194). They cannot grasp its meaning and use the empty pronoun it. Yet, they feel “a definite bond,” a “haunting” presence (195). As they enter Devon, they begin to doubt that the Corporal “died for his country” (196). The immediacy of home seems to preclude the body’s signification in a political sense. Tom’s haunting presence also manifests on a structural level: The one chapter that focalises Tom is placed in between the narrative events of repatriation and funeral. Thus, this passage can be read as a ‘revenant’ narrative: Following the asynchronous order of narration (as opposed to the chronological order of the story), Tom death has already been confirmed in the repatriation ceremony. And yet, he ‘returns’ to the narrative telling his own war story. The ‘inserted’ chapter provides a key for the ambiguous function of the haunting presence in the novel at large. Tom himself is haunted by the home farm’s cattle: “They haunted him and helped him, gave him a sort of measure. If he wanted, now, to get bad stuff out of his head, bad human pictures, it helped to replace them with cattle” (204). The effect works in different ways: The image of the cattle torments him but also provides a frame

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of reference for his battlefield experiences. Tom uses the familiar image of cows ‘going mad’—“falling down and getting up, then falling down again, … legs skidding sideways … going round in circles” (198)—to cope with battlefield atrocities: When a comrade is physically and mentally disabled in Iraq, for Tom, “it was pretty much the same” (198). And, as mentioned above, in his own moment of death he also ultimately resorts to and finds comfort in the idyllic image of grazing cattle deeply inscribed into his notion of the rural home. Though there are spectral moments before and after, Jack’s vision of Tom is the most literal figure of a ghost in the novel. This ghost seems to be evoked by a gesture Jack performs on the airfield (a similar gesture at Marleston church will set an end to the most intense phase of haunting): He “simply bent and touched the coffin—no, held it, clung to it, for several long, gluing seconds, gripped the two wooden corners nearest to him with his big thick hands as if he might never let go” (173). After this, visions of Tom follow Jack on his journey in the ‘nowhere’ of transit between airbase and Marleston: “The road was everything and … might have been anywhere” (214-215). When he realises “that Tom had come back” (215), Jack is torn between loyalty to present and past homes: “Ellie? Tom?” (215). The vision of Tom answers to an unresolved desire for the past and excludes the forward-looking Ellie, who had refused to accompany Jack on his trip: And if Ellie were with him now, sitting right beside him, would that mean Tom wouldn’t be, couldn’t be? That there couldn’t be any ghosts? Now all the other ghosts, it suddenly seemed to him, were waiting for him too—sensing his approach, beyond the end of this blue, snaking motorway.… Was he going mad? (217) As the spectral asserts its presence, the reality of the landscape Jack passes is blurred. Cities pass “like some phantom presence,” and the imaginary map of England becomes unstable, “wheel[ing] in his head” (217). He also seems detached from the reality of his body; hunger becomes an abstract need to fill an emptiness. Travelling not only denotes passing through physical space—Jack makes good progress on his trip—but also affects his thought processes. At his hotel at night, the persistent sensation of being on the road indicates Jack’s emotional restlessness: His bed trembles under him (222); and when he wakes abruptly, he is “clutching a medal” (228). This status of being in motion and in between destinations, of being physically and mentally neither here nor there provides the frame for the appearance of the ghost. The ghost’s appearance is not under Jack’s control. If anything, it takes control of him and induces him to relate obscure moments of family history—the ‘ghosts of his past.’ Jack’s detailed if still unreliable account of the night of his father’s death follows a particularly powerful manifestation. Jack is thus haunted by his past not only, but most dramatically in the form of Tom’s spectral return. On his journey across both space and time, Jack not only returns to his native village, he

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also ‘revisits’ secret and suppressed memories of home. By narrating the past, Jack works through and rethinks his narrative of self and home. The ghost escorts Jack back to their home county; and “as he entered [his hotel at night], there, briefly, was Tom again, behind the cubicle-like reception desk. As if his brother was there to welcome him” (221). And yet, Jack does not simply return, nor is his narrative a simple retelling but a ‘telling anew.’ War is there to modify the present: The Tom at the reception desk is not the brother who left but the soldier of the more recent past. There is no return to Jack’s preserved notion of home.

Returning Home: New Perspectives The impressions of the repatriation and the haunted road trip have modified Jack’s perspective when he comes back to his birthplace. He realises that the recreational and the military spheres are not as far from his idea of home as he thought: Driving towards the village, Jack contemplates the nearby landscape, noting that though “he had never been to Dartmoor” (220) its skyline had always been the horizon of home. From his changed perspective, he newly notices Dartmoor’s twofold character as holiday destination and restricted military area—and thus as the two (opposing but not hermetically sealed off) spheres that determine his more recent experiences. Recreation and war always loomed in the periphery of the rural home. Though he returns to his native village, Jack does not return home. New contexts override the old stories. The trepidation he felt in urban space and at the military base returns: “But now, as he approached his ultimate destination, he had the feeling he’d had before of being liable to arrest” (265). Nor does the familiar context reassure him when the funeral approaches. Jack’s anxieties take control, and he imagines himself as a kind of ghost: While he couldn’t have feared more the clutching actualities of the occasion before him, Jack was hoping that he might pass through them like some shadow—both there and not there.… He would be untouchable. He would be, in effect … like the corpse he would nonetheless have to bear on his shoulder. This was how he felt. (265) Jack’s mental state at this moment of confrontation with the past is narrated as traumatic. His symptoms involve dissociated perception, loss of memory, strategies of avoidance, and unbidden recollections: Such was his panic that he wouldn’t clearly recall later precisely how he arrived…. He would remember noticing that the Crown and the war memorial were still there, still uncannily in place, though he didn’t want to look straight at them, and the same applied to all the milling people…. Something like a lock in his neck kept his gaze fixed … so that even if he’d wanted to seek out and acknowledge familiar faces, he couldn’t have done so. He was in a tunnel.… Then suddenly moving

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towards him … there was Brookes [the rector], in a white surplice that reminded him of those army padres, and … [Constable] Ireton who’d once sluiced down his father’s gore from the bark of an oak tree. (267-268) These moments of confrontation with the past also mark something of a turning point. Jack himself moves towards a state of death. Pondering the upcoming funeral, Jack had already identified with the dead body: “He would be, in effect … like the corpse” (265). Now, he claims death as his space of belonging by associating it with one of the constitutive functions of home, the idea of shelter: “Death, Jack thought, … was in many ways a great place of shelter. It was life and all its knowledge that was insupportable” (256). On location in Marleston church, he then acts out his fantasies of reuniting with his dead brother, again performing the symbolical gesture of touching the coffin: He felt for a moment that he was in some box himself. He seemed to need to break through the wall of air that surrounded the coffin before he could put his hands on it (again), then his cheek to it, then his forehead, then his lips. These were actions that he hadn’t planned or foreseen, but was simply commanded by his body to do. He said, ‘I’m here, Tom. I’m here with you.’ Then he said, as if he’d not made something clear, ‘We’re both here.’ (269) In the otherwise empty sanctuary, Jack reconnects with his brother by explicitly transgressing the “wall of air” to the sphere inhabited by the dead. This mental process of ‘dying’—in other words, Jack’s propensity towards death—also mirrors the overarching narrative tension: The novel repeatedly insinuates a fatal event in the immediate narrative future—the pending murdersuicide. Jack’s plan to end Ellie’s and his own existence is suggested by the old hunting gun, which Jack has within his reach as he stands at the window of Lookout Cottage waiting for his wife. This possibility, building up over the narrative, signifies how the disruption of Jack’s basic notions of home may cause an irretrievable loss of identity. And shortly before the end of the story, Wish You Were Here once again stresses the irreversible loss of the rural home. Jack remembers in detail how he and Ellie abandoned farm life. When he follows up with his failed attempt to revisit Jebb Farm after the funeral, the novel also denies the possibility of a return to the former home. Jack can reenter the grounds only in his mind; the narrative ultimately denies him physical access. And the gate is again confirmed as the point of no return. In fact, the scene at the gate is among the most suggestive moments of the novel; it strikingly illustrates Jack’s troubled relation to home. The farmer-turnedCaravan-park-owner symbolically performs his longing to return by touching the gate, “gingerly at first,” and explicitly links this to the similar gesture of reuniting with his brother: “He felt again the wood of the coffin under his palms” (292).

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The touch releases memories of family members passing the gate at significant moments of the family history: Tom leaving the farm, Jack opening the gate one last time for his father after the momentous Remembrance Day of 1994, and the fictional return of the Luxton brothers from the battlefields of World War I. But Jack is transfixed, “as if he might stay here, stuck for ever” (292). He is reluctant to convey the strength of his inner turmoil—or perhaps, in the sense of traumatic memory, he does not have conscious access to or control over his own thoughts and memories. At this moment, the narrative suspends character focalisation: He saw in his head the old bare-wood gate. His eyes were blurred, in any case. Thus he failed to notice that he’d left behind two distinct, even identifying indications of his presence.… [Anyone] might have seen two hand-prints on the top rail, one either side of the black-lettered name. They’d been made by large hands that had obviously grasped the rail with some force, and they were hands that had recently plainly been in contact, for whatever reason, with reddish-brown earth. (293) There must be gaps in what Jack tells the reader. He gives no reason why his hands would be soiled with the earth of Jebb Farm. The narrative again emphasises his unreliability as narrator of his own story. He leaves abruptly and “with a great, unearthly howl that no one heard, he drove madly on” (294). Driving away from Jebb Farm, he ultimately abandons the idea of home it signifies. This ‘end of home’ threatens his existence whereupon his murder-suicide plans are more openly narrated in the ensuing chapters. The lingering crisis between Ellie and him breaks out into open conflict and he admits: “If he’d already got hold of the gun he might have stopped her, he might have brought this thing to an end, there and then, as intended” (305).

The Home/Front in Wish You Were Here This critical moment comes at the end of the physical and mental journey prompted by the death of the brother on the far-away battlefield. It is the violent incision of war into the troubled home sphere of the protagonist that prompts and advances the narrative of Wish You Were Here. And signs from the sphere of war are critical factors in the closure of the narrative as well. When Jack drives back towards his island residence, he explicitly denies it as a space of home. When he talks about his “homeward journey” he doubts that “that was what it was” (329). And instead, he identifies with his suicidal father: “He had his dad’s example” (329), which guides Jack to terminate this family identity once and for all. At the same time, the narrative opens up the possibility that “he might have felt he was travelling back, in more than one sense, to [Ellie]” (329). His chance for a new notion of home lies in their relationship. Once, he had assured her that they belonged together, echoing the message on the postcard he had sent her as a child: “There you are, Ell. Here you are. ‘Wish you were here.’ Now you are” (330).

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His words serve as a narrative reminder that there is an alternative to his hell-bent plans. This more positive note is confirmed by Nathalie Massoulier’s reading of Swift’s works: “the core of the Swiftian narratives [is] the elevation and edification caused by momentary destabilisation, unease and distress” (34). The novel’s instable moment is the suspenseful here and now of Jack waiting at the window for Ellie’s return while he is in the process of reframing and reevaluating the home of his past. The gun on the bed seems to work against “elevation and edification,” and dissolution and termination seem to be Jack’s course. On the ferry ride back onto the island, traversing the physical border of the sea, Jack had decided to dispose of the Luxton family identity, reified in the medal, and tossed it into the water—the active dismissal of the old idea of home. At this moment, the narrative observes Jack from afar as the gesture opens up a gap, an instability in the meaning of the home sphere. In fact, the moment condenses the novel’s idea of a shift in Jack’s thinking: to either make or mar home in the here and now. He hovers in between the ethically problematic possibility that “[p]eople can help in all kinds of ways … by dying,” proposing death as the “great solution” (342), and the objection that “people also didn’t help by dying. Because someone had to pick up the pieces” (342). Still, Jack seems to be determined to end Ellie’s and his own life. And, waiting at the cottage, he obsessively echoes this determination. Right before she comes back, however, he is interrupted. Death interferes with death (Tollance par. 10) when, once again, Tom’s ghost appears: [Jack sees] Tom standing with his back pressed against the inside of the front door through which Ellie must enter, in a barring posture that’s vaguely familiar. He’s in his full soldier’s kit, head to toe, he’s in the clothes he died in, and in his face and his eyes, too, he looks like a soldier. And this time he speaks, … ‘Shoot me first, Jack, shoot me first. Don’t be a fucking fool. Over my dead fucking body.’ (346) The ghost’s return to intervene and prevent the ultimate dissolution of home, the family, and the self is the final turning point. In contempt of the protagonist’s death wish, the novel turns towards the alternative: “Swift’s fiction has the particularity of directly addressing its readers as both its beauty and sublime belong to the realm of the ordinary, permitting to make positive what first appeared as negative in life” (Massoulier 42). Thus, when the silent ghost finds a voice to appeal to the living, Tom helps in spite of his death. This turn echoes the idea of ‘posttraumatic growth,’ which denotes a perspective on trauma that focusses on positive outcomes of traumatic experiences and the turnaround of the resilient human mind through “selfnarrative” (Meichenbaum 355). The term, unlike PTSD, does not require a medical diagnosis to be applicable: Posttraumatic growth is, according to P. Alex Linley and Stephen Joseph, “the most widely used label for describing … adaptations to traumatic stressors” even if no distinct traumatic symptoms are present (481). Tom’s intervention after his death does not sanction the questionable principle that ‘peo-

4. Novel

ple help by dying’ but must be read as an appeal to carry on in the face of adverse conditions. By always emphasising that Tom’s ghost wears uniform, the narrative stresses his role as soldier for the outcome of events. Tom was indeed in Jack’s position once, on the brink of wiping out his own family—but “when Dad had thrust the gun at him he hadn’t taken it, for the simple reason that he’d known he’d have used it on Dad first” (208). He manages to “channel and redirect [his anger]” (206) by taking it out of the home sphere and into the military realm: “He’d known … that he, Tom Luxton, had the killer instinct in him. And he’d have to put a lid on it” (209). On the battlefields of war, he releases his anger: “The first time he’d fired for real and seen his man drop, he’d felt anger fly out of him, he’d felt a great whoosh of sanity and calmness. Now he’d done it. He’d even thought he might never need to do it again” (206). The predicaments that build up in the home sphere accumulate in the motif of madness—and are translated into sanity in the sphere of war. Tom’s authority lies in this capacity when he confronts Jack at the cottage. The narrative even ensures that he does not contaminate the home sphere upon his return. He may wear “the clothes he died in,” but his fatal injuries are conspicuously absent. Tom’s violent and painful death thus can be read as “[s]ublime suffering” (Massoulier 39) that transforms the soldier into a noncontagious messenger. As an apparition, Tom belongs to the “Swiftian sublime” that “invariably purifies characters’ and readers’ relationships to the world,” Massoulier argues (35). In a sense, both Tom and Jack return from their battlefields in the end—Iraq and the domestic front respectively. Jack, checked by his brother’s warning, returns to Ellie and the alternative home she embodies. Though the novel does not spell it out, it suggests a future for the couple at the Lookout. That both brothers come back home calls to mind the story of the Luxton brothers returning from World War I battlefields. The two pairs of brothers seem to suggest a cyclical time structure, history repeating itself (Drobot, “The Use of Time” 551). But George and Fred’s homecoming is fictional. Jack and Tom return for ‘real’ (although imagination plays a role) if not to the family home as it was before. Tom as a spectral presence affirms Jack’s new family with Ellie. And Jack takes first steps towards a modified idea of home and family, burying the old and turning towards the new. This outcome is a testimony to the power of narrative in Wish You Were Here. Andrew James confirms that Swift “is intrigued by the fundamental human need to tell stories in order to overcome trauma” (1). Storytelling in the novel opens up the possibility to change the apparently inexorable course of Jack’s traumatic history. As children, Tom and Jack had been acting under the influence of their mother’s tale, which limited solidarity to the Luxton circle. Tom’s ghost challenges the judgement of this narrative when he protects Ellie. Only a narrative that “disrupts understanding” of existing narratives and “generates reflection” can work against what Sara Cobb calls “narrative violence,” the unthinking repetition of narrative, exclud-

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ing one party (Ellie, in this case) from participation (39). In the concluding chapter, the novel insists on continuity, though changed and reshaped, over discontinuity. In Wish You Were Here, contemporary war forces the protagonist to reconsider home. The character of Jack longs for and mourns an idea of home moulded from a nostalgic ideal of rural life. But the narrative unmistakably subverts his testimony of an untainted home sphere, not only because Jack himself proves to be unreliable in his account of the traumatic incidents but also because the decline of rural life powerfully provokes the dissolution of the family at the centre of this home. The—anyways imaginary—location of the ideal home is pushed back further and further in time until it likewise dissolves in never unblemished memories of childhood. War and conflict, it turns out, is never far from home in the novel in the first place. It is written into the very fabric of the protagonist’s family identity through the foundation myth passed on—and indeed manipulated at will—by the mother. The war honours of their ancestors, symbolised in the medal and the annual performance of the Remembrance Day ceremonies in the village, constitute the Luxton identity and their significance within the home sphere on the communal scale. War or, more precisely, the war-related military existence of Tom is further presented as the alternative life script to Jack’s existence in the recreational sphere of the Caravan site. And however remote and ‘non-warlike’ the location of Jack’s present place of residence is, the global War on Terror descends upon the carefree holidaymakers and their ‘commander’ Jack at the Lookout Caravan Park. Sending Jack on both a physical and mental journey, war elicits the possibility to rethink long-held ideas. In the imagined, never-enacted scenes, Jack probes new configurations. But war is more than a trigger to dispel an obsolete home ideal and adapt the notion of home to present-day realities. For the integration into the selfnarrative, traumatic incidents are measured against war. The unprocessed deaths of Jack’s parents prevent him to create a new family identity in the present; the BSE crisis and its aftermath demolished the central notions of his farming identity. In the face of contemporary war and its effects on his private and professional life, a space of reevaluation opens up. For a long time, the narrative suggests that Jack will follow the precedent of his father, who failed to provide a frame for a reliable family identity—the end of home altogether. The alternative is to reinterpret memory for a modified life narrative. Jack seems to tend towards the former. And it is the battletested ghost of his brother who forces Jack to reconsider. The emergent family home is only hinted at in the novel. But contemporary reality has been defined all along: Security concerns prevail; the need for shelter is acute. The gesture that determines the last moment of the narrative answers to this need of protection: Jack welcomes Ellie back home with an umbrella to guard her against the unalterable reality of the weather—the gesture is, for Stacey D’Erasmo, a sign of “redemption.” This is still the claim of home: to be an antipole against

4. Novel

hostile forces. The narrative shows that the interplay is dynamic and that war is as much a reality of the British cultural sphere as the need for a home that denies war and death to take over control.

4.3.

Findings: Narrating the Home/Front

As the novels analysed in this chapter show, contemporary warfare appears as a theme that is embedded in the experience of British life today. As different aspects stand out in these texts, a closer look shows how war works in the background of the narratives and manifests in complex ways within the experiential realm of the British protagonists. The texts reflect the idea that the military campaigns recoil upon the homeland and home culture in manifold but often indirect ways, reflecting that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are waged in an unresolved present in the extraneous space away from the homeland. British identification with these wars in terms of responsibility, position, or possible repercussions is subject to narrative configuration. The primary, often exclusive means to render visible the action of war in Iraq and Afghanistan for people at home are media representations. In the novels, this media presence characterises both conflicts and finds expression in the accumulation of media-related issues and practices in the texts. In Saturday, the narrative oscillates between the oversaturation and repetitiveness of news broadcasting and the compulsive and anxious return to media consumption. The encounter with ‘the real Tony Blair’ is an insight beyond media representation that singles out the protagonist from those around him. This underlines his privileged status but, on a more general level, also juxtaposes media images and the more ambivalent undertones of reality: the possibility of doubt in the Prime Minister which is absent from his television appearances. The truthfulness of the recorded image is also a theme in The Illuminations. While the process of developing the photographic print reveals a truth (Daniel), the truth is much harder to get at (H. Lee). The photographer’s images, which in her time marked a new documentary trend to show everyday life, work towards revealing something previously obscured by her embellished life story. Double Vision more critically discusses the function of the photographer as an artist who, like the painter Goya before, faces the problematic “appetite for spectacle” (101) in visual representations of the atrocities of war and who interferes with and shapes reality. In The Accidental, video recording works as a filter that actually impedes access to reality, despite its documentary character. The defamiliarising effect of the camera is duplicated in the active manipulation of photographic images—with fatal repercussions—and in the process of detachment from the unsettling Abu Ghraib pictures, a sort of overfamiliarisation with images of suffering and torture.

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This preoccupation with representation points to the problem to render meaningful one’s experience in a context that offers increased access to (visual) information while familiar reference points and boundaries, such as the family or the exclusion of violence from home, are called into question. Double Vision openly acknowledges the influence of the discourse on the representability of war, violence, and suffering when it refers to Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others in the “Author’s Note” (208). But all of the abovementioned texts somehow reflect the discourse on visual representation. In the text-based novel, the ekphrastic, as Mary Trabucco shows for Double Vision, also leads over to more abstract negotiations of, for instance, the ethics of representation. These negotiations are empowered by the transfer of the image from the visual to the textual medium (Trabucco, “Between” 146). The textualnarrative mode of the novel enables analytic imaginary spaces to explore these ‘visual’ issues. Moreover, the character of the novel allows for the creation of a “peculiarly private” narrative, as Swift said in an interview: “There’s no limit to the degree of intimacy you can put into a novel, to the rawness and nakedness with which you can present human behaviour and emotion” (qtd. in Foyles). The novel simulates access to the individual consciousness, usually through intimate character focalisation, and shows the inward struggle to make sense of the experience of war and the demands it makes on the individual. War is responsible for a perturbation of the lives and minds of these characters. In Saturday, for example, this takes shape in the probing of possible positions towards war in a globalised and politicised urban context that—through its incessant medial repetitions and the political seeping into the private family context—demands taking a stand. The stirring of the traumatic stasis of the protagonist’s idea of belonging in Wish You Were Here is initiated by an incursion of war into his experiential and perceptual world. In The Illuminations, the example of the Major’s response to war, which takes a destructive turn in Afghanistan, redirects the hero’s search for familial coherence—which, so far, he had sought by following his dead father into the army—towards the living members at home. The invasive presence of the stranger in The Accidental realises the until then covert disunity of the family, whose problematics resound with the workings of Britain at war. Still, the military conflicts are more than random triggers that could be substituted by any crisis at hand. The Iraq War appears as the conflict that demands a political position, as in Saturday, Demo and One of Us. The Iraq War thus also takes place in the political sphere of Britain as the texts refer to the run-up to war, the role of political decision-makers, the expression of political opinion, and so on. The campaign in Afghanistan with its longer deployment of UK troops generally appears as a protracting, gruelling conflict whose less divisive original objective waned with time, rendering the engagement erratic, unresolved, pointless. It is the location of novels that actually set part or all of their action in the war zone,

4. Novel

such as Follow Me Home, Torn, and Rain, but also the more reflective war reporter novels We Are Now Beginning Our Descent and The Repercussions. Remembering his assignment in Afghanistan, the war correspondent Kellas in We Are Now Beginning Our Descent at one point thinks about the nature of the depersonalised airborne war in Afghanistan that mirrors 9/11: “Yet no fulfilment lay in the destruction without a moment of understanding” (65). That is, violent action is only an act of war when it carries meaning, when it delivers signification as well as destruction. For Kellas, too, war occurs at home in London where the irruption of violence manifests as he himself lashes out at a dinner party. The novels rarely address the political history of the foreign spheres or the perspectives of their inhabitants. Instead, they locate the recent conflicts within the present-day perspective of the British on themselves. The novels often focus on events and signifiers of the wars within the home sphere like the demonstrations, the Hutton report on the death of weapons expert David Kelly, and the media representation, or employ other strategies of appropriation to conceive of the wars at home. Soldier novels like The Poppy Factory or Acting Up use the topos of return from the battlefield rather than stories of combat and focus on the reintegration at home. Primarily presenting cases of PTSD in a contemporary setting, they add little to the specific negotiation of contemporary war. The soldier characters in The Illuminations and Wish You Were Here, however, go to war as a reaction to what Luke in The Illuminations calls feeling “homesick all my life” (128). Their essential homelessness and disconnection from family lead them to seek belonging in the military sphere. They conceive of war through a preserved sense of home: Wish You Were Here’s Tom finds strategies of coping in his memories of life at the farm; and in The Illuminations, Luke compares the Afghan surroundings with the “fresher landscape” of the Scottish homeland in his grandmother’s photographs (41). They conceive of war through the incalculable, yet very material threat of faceless enemies and covert roadside bombs, which resounds with the culture of fear back home where the threat of terrorism looms large but hardly ever materialises—at least not in the form of actual terrorist attacks. In the novels, war manifests in spaces of home in manifold ways—partly more directly as characters lose a loved one or neighbourhoods are taken over by protesters, partly in a transferred sense as in the burglary, invasion, or conversion of houses and the fragmentation of family. War unsettles identities, the sense of belonging, to negotiate and rework home into a contemporary home/front, a place of conflict not ‘over there’ but ‘right here.’ The overlapping of the spheres of war and home, the transferral of meaning both ways across the divide of the semiotic and the extrasemiotic is especially intricate in Wish You Were Here. This novel at the same time illustrates how war is always already somehow present in the British domain: The family identity is based on a narrative of war; the use of force determines the demise of the family; and systematic death is also

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already at work in the rural community. The circular narrative of Saturday seems to return to its status quo after the intruder is expelled. And yet, the intrusion only manifests what resides in the protagonist’s mind altogether: a homeland and culture anticipating violent disruption—fears that even shine through in the hero’s euphoric early-morning thoughts. They still hold him captive at night as he imagines his home town on the brink of war: “London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb” just like “Baghdad is waiting for its bombs” (276-277). The home/front of Double Vision, looming in the dark domestic landscapes revealed in the photographs, is not suspended by the protagonist’s hopeful interpersonal connection to his young lover. Instead, the relationship emerges in consequence of it. And neither The Illuminations nor The Accidental resolve the problematic presence of war. The intrusion in The Accidental upsets family relationships, but there is no return to a traditional family setting, no reinstatement of something that was not there in the first place. The Illuminations rearranges and restores family relationships, believing that a true connection might be possible; and the novel explicitly links the fate of the family and the fate of the country at war: “They came alive arguing with each other and so did the country” (179). The narrative acknowledges that change is constant and that the home—as family and nation—will be changed by its conflicts. Because of the emphasis on individual mindscapes, the novels are concerned with the workings of personal memory as well as personal experience and perception. Some novels integrate textual records in the form of journals, others oral narratives of the past, such as One of Us, and some rely in large part on the reminiscences of a focaliser like Saturday or We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. Wish You Were Here in particular shifts quickly between present, remembered, and hypothetical scenes. The suspension of chronology is thus made possible and promotes the interweaving of home and war across temporal divides. The post-World War II history of the grandmother in The Illuminations may thus be linked to the present-day war experiences of the grandson. And the traumatised mind of the war reporter in Double Vision may superimpose traumatic memory on his present experience. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq constitute major crises for Britain in the 2000s. Their impact on novel writing in the UK may very well be much larger than producing fiction with an overt war theme. And yet, the examination of novels addressing the wars directly reveals that the war experience is more than topical décor. The war theme may be bound up with questions of globalisation and cosmopolitanism, not least for its wider frame of the War on Terror. Still, war itself affects and (re)shapes British lives in these fictions; war invades and unsettles the subjective perception, experience, and home of individuals and leaves them changed, acknowledging war as part of their cultural sphere of belonging, as part of a home/front.

5. Stage Plays

In the agitated political climate of the early 2000s, British theatre responded promptly to the invasion of Iraq. First reactions to the war-to-be reached the stage as early as January 2003 (Gupta 104). By 2005, the invasion and ensuing occupation had, according to Chris Megson, “triggered an upsurge of political theatre in Britain unparalleled since the Vietnam War” (“This is” 369). New plays, such as Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006) or Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006), as well as adaptations of classical drama addressed Britain’s participation in the military campaign abroad. In 2009, Tom Sutcliffe praised the stage for producing all the relevant stories of war: “if you want to see something that reflects real British lives now,” he wrote, “you will probably need to switch off the television and head to the theatre” (“For Good”). Nonetheless, in 2008, Nicholas Kent, who was at the time artistic director of “Britain’s foremost political” stage, the Tricycle Theatre in London (Billington, “The Great”), felt the need to also spark the public debate about the British military involvement in Afghanistan. He commissioned a series of short plays about the country’s war-torn history, among them Simon Stephens’s A Canopy of Stars and Richard Bean’s On the Side of the Angels (Kent 7). The playlets were staged in a day-long event in April 2009 under the title The Great Game: Afghanistan. Since then, other plays addressing the conflict in Afghanistan, such as D.C. Moore’s The Empire (2010), followed.

5.1.

Exploration: New Home/Fronts on the British Stage

The readiness to respond to war attests to the stage’s penchant for the political. For Amelia Howe Kritzer, it is based on theatre’s “paradigmatic relationship to the polis”: In the theatre, “assembled citizens view and consider representations of their world enacted for them in the immediacy of live performance” (Political 1). In the case of Iraq, Michael Billington notes, it was the striking illegality of the invasion and the ill-fated occupation that made “political theatre … a necessity rather than an optional extra” (State 392). Ironically, only New Labour’s increased funding of the arts following the Boyden Report of 2000 enabled theatre to return to “creative

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protest” and serve once again as “a strenuously oppositional voice” (Billington, State 392, 365). At the time, topical urgency and financial opportunity brought war to the stage. But war and theatre are more generally linked by the performative. In Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta notes that “the war zone is like a stage and those in it become self-conscious performers … displaced from the everyday life of ‘real’ selves and located in an ‘irrational place’” (96; also, Soncini 14). This link between war and theatre is reflected in terms like the “theatre of war,” the “‘players’ or ‘actors’ in a conflict,” and “the ‘staging’ of political power by the public exertion of violence which refers back to … the word theatron: a place for viewing” (Boll 20-21). What is more, as media events, the recent wars in particular provide a platform for performative ‘acts of war’ that create or seek to create reality, such as George W. Bush’s ‘mission accomplished’ speech on an aircraft carrier (Colleran 17, 19) or the antiwar marches in 2003 (J. Spencer, Editor’s 4). War and terrorism are “powerful interventions … via theatrical acts,” Jenny Hughes argues (“Theatre” 149). In turn, the spectacle of 9/11 and its political and military aftermath served to activate political theatre (J. Spencer, Editor’s 1). For Jeanne Colleran, it is the “seen/unseen dynamic” of dramatic performance, “the fort/da … the stage and offstage” that links to the “tactics of invisibility” of recent war reporting in the media, whose excess of images obscures censored or otherwise unavailable information. “War as theatre,” Colleran concludes, “is no longer a metaphor” (14). Apart from this ‘kinship’ of war and theatre, the stage is also understood as a place for new perspectives that challenge media representations of war. Lib Taylor, for instance, claims that in “a world dominated by mediation, hyper-reality and imitation” theatre offers an alternative space of critical examination and discussion (233). With their “tropes of ‘directness’ and ‘immediacy’” (Megson, “Verbatim” 529), fact-based formats in particular stimulate the debate on political issues, Lib Taylor notes (234). Hughes, on the other hand, finds that dramatic performance can obscure the unsettling realities of contemporary life when it breaks down “the chaos and destruction of war” into the “highly polished version of reality” of some verbatim approaches (“Theatre” 162-163). Then again, Karen Malpede, theatre maker and coeditor of Acts of War (2011), an anthology of Iraq and Afghanistan War plays, shares Lib Taylor’s faith in the ability of theatre to further reflection: In the contemplative place theater provides, we might become citizens of the times in which we live. It is at the intersect between public moral dilemma and the individual capacity to understand and feel that theater of war and witness enters, useful and meaningful, to create a communal gathering space in which we might consider together the sorts of societal choices, their reasons and consequences, we fail to fully grasp in isolation. (Malpede XVII)

5. Stage Plays

Still, in contrast to Lib Taylor, Malpede calls for “stories, not sound bites, not documentary pastiches, but the tales of characters who live through a series of events both instigated by and imposed on them” (XVIII) to provide this collective thinking space for the pressing issues of the time. The present chapter picks up on Malpede’s cue and looks at fictional or at least decidedly fictionalised stories negotiating the experience of war on the British stage. Ariel Watson, writing on recent Scottish drama, generalises: War plays are about the mobility of human populations and identities; they are about countries in flux and in conflict, strangers in a strange land reflecting on the Verfremdungseffekt of performing nation outside its boundaries. They are about occupiers and the occupied, and the ambivalences of identity in between. (244) In accordance with Ariel Watson’s general observations on plays of war, drama on contemporary war negotiates cultural identity unsettled. In practice, the examined plays break down the experience of war to focus on individual perspectives. Though often political, plays of contemporary war do not necessarily or even predominantly engage with political leaders—in spite of examples like David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004), a play about “the adventures of Colin Powell” in the run-up to the Iraq War (Soto-Morettini 309) that mixes factual and fictional elements. Certainly, the material considered here mainly reflects on how ordinary people are affected by conflict. In view of this study’s focus on fictional narratives, the present chapter is aware of but does not address in detail more straightforward forms of documentary drama, nor does it look at adaptations of classical and Shakespearean plays. For reasons of comparability with the material analysed in the other chapters, experimental performances and plays that may be read as coded responses to contemporary conflict only, such as Howard Barker’s The Dying of Today (2008), a play about a man who brings news of a battlefield defeat to his barber, are also excluded. Their theatrical dimension demarcates plays of war from prose and film narratives: Drama is written to be performed on stage. Arguably, both dramatic performance and film are visual and audible ‘texts’ and thus emphasise spatiality and the physical body (Fischer-Lichte, Performativität 62). Both include forms of enactment, share patterns of scenic segmentation, and are bound to performance and screening time respectively. What distinguishes drama is the liveness or ‘event character’ of its performance and the copresence of audience and actors at the venue (FischerLichte, Performativität 54, 67). The promenade productions of Jonathan Holmes’s Fallujah (2007), Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007), and Adam Brace’s Stovepipe (2009) as well as the traverse stage of Gregory Burke’s Black Watch play on this immediacy of the theatrical event to convey an experience of war on stage. In reference to Philip Auslander’s Liveness (1999), Claudia Georgi notes that there is no clear demarcation between live and media representation in today’s mediatised culture (13). For Jenny Spencer, however, “the simple act of gathering” at the theatre

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is crucial to create a public yet safe space for alternative representations (Editor’s 2). Colleran observes that live performance competes with the “spectacle” of media representation and its deceptive “sense of immediacy”; before theatre can achieve its own “political effect,” it must prevail against media images present in the minds of audiences (15, 20). The plays, however, do not only compete with but also integrate different media: video recordings, radio snippets, choreography, music, and others. They also stand in transmedial contexts—including radio plays, recordings for television and DVD release, and the published playtext—and display features of intermediality.1 Video documentation, academic research, and reviews give additional information on productions and specific performances for the analyses. The recordings of Black Watch and Owen Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F. (2012), for instance, provide an insight into the staging of (the body of) the returning soldier. Not least through forms of expression emphasising embodiment and copresence (e.g., song, dance and movement, audience address), the physical reality of the theatrical experience has a specific affective potential for the audience on site. This is especially relevant when plays explore the effect of the physical force of war on the human body and mind as in The Two Worlds of Charlie F. or Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity (2004). For Erika Fischer-Lichte, the copresence not only actuates the semiotic process of meaning-making but also works on a phenomenological level (Performativität 11) where sensory impressions are created that exceed the semiotic code (“Performativität” 257). To express the troubling, unprocessed experience of war, the audience’s visceral perception in the here and now of the theatrical performance is underscored by the event’s essential unrepeatability: It is always a onetime constellation of performed action and present audience (Fischer-Lichte, Performativität 67). Sarah Beck, for example, describes how the presence of ex-servicemen and relatives of soldiers killed in action at performances of Black Watch had an effect on themselves and theatre makers alike (147-149). More generally, the actual presentation of the dramatic action is subject to the “ephemerality” and “unpredictability” of any life event (Georgi 5)—and, in this, provides a link to the incalculability of the experience of contemporary war (Fleming 230).

State of Research Research on British drama of contemporary war frequently highlights fact-based approaches as an important playing field for writers (e.g., Angelaki 27; Haydon 41). Verbatim performance, building on the documentary theatre of the 1990s, “afforded

1

In his article “Intermediality in Theatre and Performance,” Chiel Kattenbelt distinguishes between multimediality, i.e., the use of different sign systems and/or disciplines “in one and the same object,” transmediality, i.e., “the transfer from one medium to another,” and intermediality, i.e., “the co-relation of media in the sense of mutual influences” (20-21, 22).

5. Stage Plays

the most incisive critique of the political handling of the Iraqi crisis,” Megson explains (“This is” 370).2 Staging interviews, protocols of investigative hearings, and other documentary material, verbatim drama is based on a strong reference to reallife events and experiences and closely guided by its factual sources (Hammond and Steward 9). It often focusses on “pressing issues of public interest” neglected by news media, with a special interest in human rights violations in the context of the War on Terror (Megson, “Verbatim” 530-531). Similarly, Michael Balfour points to the idea of a theatrical ‘counter statement’ to news reporting on war: The turn to testimony during the height of the war-on-terror campaign … may have been driven by a response to the ferocious melodrama of war stories in the media from embedded journalists. The news offered a diet full of image-driven stories … that carried a heightened symbolic energy too often bereft of an ideological critique. (32-33) The “discarded negatives” of war reporting are, for instance, the concern of writer and academic Jonathan Holmes (A. de Waal, Theatre 228). His play Fallujah goes for an ethically invested theatre of bearing witness and listening to “otherwise unheard voices” (xiv). The original promenade production seeks “to recreate the experience of being in the midst of a war zone” (P. Fisher, “Fallujah”). In Holmes’s own words, it aims at “the most multivocal representation possible of a largely unreported event,” the siege of the eponymous Iraqi city in 2004 (qtd. in Botham 308). The extended playtext collects various documentary sources to underscore this claim. London’s Tricycle Theatre (now Kiln Theatre) is known for its political plays and, especially, for verbatim drama. The 2004 production of Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, for instance, brought to the stage interviews with detainees of the infamous prison camp. The Tricycle staged a series of such ‘tribunal plays,’ which dramatised transcripts of official hearings, including Richard Norton-Taylor’s plays Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry (2003), which investigated the death of weapons expert David Kelly, and Called to Account: The Indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the Crime of Aggression against Iraq—A Hearing (2007), which dealt with the government’s role in the decision to go to war. Elsewhere, verbatim was taken less literally: Hare’s Stuff Happens, first staged at London’s National Theatre, mixed documented statements of political decision makers, such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and imagined scenes set behind closed doors, “blurring the boundaries between the authentic and the constructed” (Soncini 103). Steve Gilroy’s award-winning Motherland (2007), first performed at Live Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, avoids the political sphere and

2

See Will Hammond and Dan Steward’s Verbatim, Verbatim (2008) for a closer look at documentary plays and recent war; also, Suman Gupta (105-119), Julia Boll (81-102), and others.

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collects the private voices of mothers and sisters, wives and girlfriends of soldiers injured, killed, or still serving abroad. Documentary modes range from plays rather loosely based on factual material to ‘headphone verbatim,’ where prosodic features, repetitions, and disruptions of speech are ‘echoed’ by actors listening to recorded interviews via headphones as they perform on stage (Wake 321-322). Such ‘facsimile’ approaches suggest a specific relation to—though not a necessity for—naturalism, Caroline Wake observes (326-327). But an interest in truthfulness to the source material, not ruling out its subversion, may be present in less strictly documentary forms as well (Hammond and Steward 131). In the course of this chapter, two plays will be analysed that represent an interest in fact-based source material without a strict verbatim approach: Gregory Burke’s Black Watch and Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F. These plays exemplify the possibilities of the factual embedded in the imaginary for negotiating the invasion of contemporary war into British lives on the stage. Overall, however, post-9/11 theatre on war and terrorism uses a much wider spectrum of expression than such fact-based modes. For example, the contributions to Jenny Spencer’s Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11 discuss musicals, concerts, antiwar activism, and theatrical protest. Jenny Hughes’s article in this volume, for instance, looks at the global antiwar demonstrations of 2003, Brian Haw’s protest camp outside of the Houses of Parliament, and the installation of a Guantánamo detention camp replica in Manchester (“Camping”). The response to recent warfare in more conventional dramatic performances was also not limited to verbatim plays. Research mentions, for instance, satires such as Justin Butcher’s The Madness of George Dubya (2003) and Alistair Beaton’s Follow My Leader (2004) (Megson, “This is” 369; also, Billington, State 379; Gupta 104; Kritzer, “America” 53). More widely acknowledged as a major line in theatre on contemporary war are productions of classical drama.3 At the time, these productions could hardly avoid resonances with conflicts so “emphatically centralized in media and everyday discourses,” Gupta argues (126). Reviewing the National Theatre’s 2003 production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Charles Spencer comments that the drama might well have been written last week, rather than 400 years ago.… As the young king, his court, and the bishops debate the legitimacy of the war, we could be at a Number 10 Cabinet meeting discussing Security Council resolution 1441 on Iraq. (“A Tale”) The contentious Iraq War also “made Greek tragedy, and Euripides especially, essential” (Billington, State 392), leading to productions of Iphigenia at Aulis (National Theatre 2004) and Hecuba (Arena Theatre 2004; Donmar Warehouse 2004; Albery 3

See, for example, Julia Boll’s chapter “Palimpsest” (113-142) or Suman Gupta’s section on “Classics” (125-138) for productions and adaptations of the classics in the context of war.

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Theatre 2005) (Cousin 120-121). Adaptations like Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender (2004) also play a role. As “a fundamental update in meaning and intent” of Sophocles’s The Trachiniae, Cruel and Tender is set against the backdrop of new wars on the African continent (Boll 117, 149). Restaging and reimagining the classics in the context of contemporary war, Gupta suggests, might trade on classical drama’s “unquestionable literary authority,” providing reassurance in the face of present-day anxieties—or might simply have been a safe way to raise the contentious political issues of the period (137). In the present chapter, the only play that is based on a classic is Days of Significance, though its rather free references to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing play a subordinate role in the present context. The dense intertextuality and mostly figurative reference to contemporary conflict in restaged and reworked classical drama, however, would lead away from the focus of inquiry here. And a third type of plays takes centre stage in the present chapter: new writing of fictional drama dealing with twenty-first century British life in the presence of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. Studies by Suman Gupta, Julia Boll, Sara Soncini, and Ariane de Waal have the largest overlap with the present chapter, though their foci differ. In Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion (2011), Gupta attests to the significance of British theatrical production for the cultural representation of the Iraq War. Next to sections on documentary and classical theatre, Gupta deals with “Frontline” as well as “Domestic and national” drama. Boll’s The New War Plays (2013) examines the “symptomatic portrayal” (8) of “the changed nature of war” (1) in contemporary theatre; the corpus centres on but is not limited to British work and includes plays merely “informed by” what theorists call the ‘new wars’ (7). Soncini’s Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage also proceeds from new wars theory but looks at problematics of representation, at documentary forms and forms of witnessing, and at the function of translator figures. Soncini’s study, too, includes work from outside the UK and is not limited to the wars of the 2000s. The War on Terror is the context of Ariane de Waal’s Theatre on Terror (2017), a study of the poststructuralist notion of subject positions in plays on war and terrorism that aims to “(re)politicise the discourse on post-9/11 theatre” (2). In Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain (2017), Vicky Angelaki claims that political theatre “confuse[s], distract[s], disturb[s]” expectations and dominant cultural narratives, “sees the potential in crisis,” and seeks “to understand [the fluidity of our time] better so as to see whether, and how, it might hold promise” (3-4). Her observations link to the present study’s idea that fictional narratives explore the effect of war to reimagine and come to an understanding of British life today. Plays on recent wars contrive visions of home struggling with the realities of the wars that affect the here and now. They explore war as an invasion into the homeland, often via the travelling figure of the soldier. After exploring the variety of perspectives on home in times of war in recent drama more generally, the

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present chapter goes on to consider fact-based if decidedly fictionalised plays for their potential to shift boundaries of reality and performance to negotiate home in the face of war. Following this, the inscription of war on the home sphere in the limited number of plays that focus on civilian exchanges is investigated, adding to these constructions of a home/front. A close reading of Simon Stephens’s Motortown, a play that is representative not least for revolving around a returning soldier, concludes the analyses and illustrates how negotiations of war on the British stage indeed rely on the interaction of home and war spheres to conceive of contemporary conflict.

5.1.1.

Homecoming Soldiers: The Return of War

New British writing offers a variety of approaches to negotiate the interplay of recent warfare and the cultural home sphere within fictional dramatic narratives. Each play launches ideas and imagery to conceive of the presence of war at home and thus contributes to the diverse interventions of war on the British stage. As in the novel and in film, the soldier often epitomises the impact of war on home in British drama about “representative but fictional characters” who deal with the effects of contemporary war (Edgar 113). These plays tell the stories of servicemen, usually of lower rank, and their friends and family at home. Variations can be found in the private military contractors—or “soldiers for hire” (Sutcliffe, “For Good”)—in Brace’s Stovepipe or the war reporter in Colin Teevan’s How Many Miles to Basra? (2006). The variety of dramatic narratives about soldiers alone underlines the preoccupation of contemporary drama with the impact of Britain’s recent wars on the homeland: In the plays, the soldier is often not an active combatant but frequently a returnee whose war experience interferes with his life back at home. Embodying the exchange between the domains of home and war, the returning soldier renders visible the line drawn to demarcate the sphere of belonging and, crossing this border, at the same time calls it into question (Frank 223). Whereas the changes of setting in Roy Williams’s Days of Significance, analysed below, follow the soldier to the front and back, Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity is firmly settled in a troubled domestic sphere disrupted by the return of the soldier. In both plays, the returnee comes back to a home modelled after different but rather specific sociocultural realities in Britain: working-class urban youth and the economically challenged farming family respectively.

War Games in Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity While the archetype of the returning soldier has been present on stage since ancient Greek drama (Russel E. Brown 29), Jonathan Lichtenstein’s 2004 play The Pull of Negative Gravity introduces the figure to the context of the military campaigns of the War on Terror. Following mainly realistic conventions, the play compares to

5. Stage Plays

the First World War drama The Silver Tassie (1929) rather than more recent work like Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) or Stephens’s Motortown, Paul Goetsch notes (138). While early drama on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is often fact-based and deals with the politics of war, The Pull of Negative Gravity is an angry play (Finkle) but does not openly address the political sphere (Roca). Nor is Lichtenstein’s play based on testimonies of veterans but resorts to a fictional setting entirely (Boll 93). The Pull of Negative Gravity, first staged at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in August 2004, explores the effect of war on a fictional farming family which “endured and survived generations of hardship, but cannot survive the chaotic impact of war on their lives” (Gardner, “The Pull”). At home, in the idyllic but economically challenged Welsh countryside, mother Vi, brother Rhys, and fiancée Bethan await the return of soldier Dai. When he comes back, he is speech-impaired and in a wheelchair, bringing “the nightmare every soldier’s family must dread … right into the home” (L. Walker). Dai and Bethan marry, but the bride soon realises that she is repulsed by her groom’s disabled body. Though in his absence she had turned down his brother, she now approaches Rhys and is, in turn, rejected. The dissolution of the family, challenged all along by the decline of the farm, accelerates. Ultimately, Vi is forced to sell, and after Dai’s death the remaining family members dissipate. Set in rural Wales, the play has parallels with Graham Swift’s novel Wish You Were Here (2011) (chapter 4.2.). Both draw on established motifs for the presentation of rural life: the challenged farm, a woman invested in the continuity of home, an absent (suicidal) father, and a son or brother at war (Head, “Mapping” 22). But while Swift explores the renegotiation of home in the protagonist’s mental and physical journey, Lichtenstein tells his story of war and rural demise as a game of chance already lost. Llanelwedd Farm is part of a community seized by the economic decline of the agricultural sector. Ruin is certain—except for a family in the neighbourhood that was “clever” enough to cheat the government to get compensation in the foot-and-mouth epidemic (39). Help from the centre of the homeland is not insufficient and belated as in Wish You Were Here but removed and unable to answer to the realities of the agricultural crisis. The fate of Llanelwedd is sealed in an unfair game: “A fair price? What’s fair about it? Tell me that. What’s the price of history? Of family?” Vi asks (9). Home is at the mercy of something beyond the control of its inhabitants. Trying to save the bankrupt farm, which drove her husband Gwilym to suicide, Vi earns a little extra stuffing envelopes for an insurance company’s lottery game. Boxes of blanks fill her home, defying the claim that “you can win a fortune if you insure yourself” (12). The ironic reference to this losing game is “a symbolic tip-off to [Vi’s] own lot in life” (Finkle). War plays a specific role in the perfidious game that rules home. Dai’s deployment to Iraq ultimately negates the anyway slim chances of continuity of farm and family that his engagement to Bethan holds for Vi: “It should’ve been Rhys who went.… Then this farm might not be in such a predicament. And if Dai had stayed

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instead of him you’d have been walked down that aisle a beaming girl” (6). Gradually, the play discloses the course of a game of heads or tails between the brothers to determine which of them is to go to war. Though Rhys loses and is bound to go, Dai takes over for him and puts his own head at stake in the risky game of war: “The things that go on there, that you hear on the news. There are so many attacks every day,” Rhys notes (16). Dai’s decision goes against the game’s outcome and thus introduces an element of choice to the case of war. But Dai does not fare nearly as well with his attempt to cheat fate as the neighbours cheating in the crisis at home. Ultimately, the slim odds of farm home and soldier to survive economic hardship and war respectively come together in the person of Dai. In the scenes of his return as imagined by his mother, bride, and brother, he is always welcomed affectionately. They picture him as a “proud young veteran in a kilt, covered in medals, bathed in the stage’s gentle violet light” (Roca). He may appear “a bit different now” (31) or is even injured, but he is always recognisable, devoted, and will surely recover. But when he actually returns, his permanently disfigured body provokes aversion rather than compassion: “No one moves” (35) to welcome him. When he is alone with Bethan, the play underscores how war deprives him of “part of his humanity” (Boll 94): His injuries turn him into an inarticulate, crawling ‘animal’ rejected by his bride. Dai’s maimed body prevents the consummation of their marriage, shattering hopes for the continuation of the family line. Additionally, on an earlier night, Dai had also spoiled the weak hope of financial support for the farm that Vi’s envelopes signify. Scratching the blanks, he plays without a chance to win in the first place. Still, the impact of war the play suggests goes further than the trauma of the soldier and the lost hope he embodies. War also exerts an inexorable force—the title’s ‘negative gravity’—on those who stayed at home. Bethan, a hospital nurse, witnesses the defacing effect of battle on her soldier patients even before her fiancé comes back disfigured. Left emotionally unstable, she becomes fascinated with the helicopters transporting the injured from the war zone and, every so often, loses herself dancing in the tremulations of the military aircraft flying over a nearby hill: Chinooks. You feel them before you hear them, before you see them. Can you feel it now? … It comes up from the ground, through into your feet, into your legs. Shut your eyes. Concentrate. Feel it. It’s pushing up. Through your feet, up through your legs into your arse, into your cunt, into your belly, into your chest, into your head, into your brain. And out the other side. (21) Bethan subjects herself to this physical impact of war, losing touch with the reality of her life at home. In the final scene, she goes on a recreational ride in the vacuum created behind the flying Chinook. Here, she literally and figuratively enters the empty, meaningless space left by war. Giving way to its luring ‘pull of negative gravity,’ she deliberately jumps to her death.

5. Stage Plays

Historic specificities of the (early) Iraq War are not the primary concern of the play. It rather negotiates war more generally as an extrasemiotic space of “[n]o rules” (57). The army constitutes a transit zone between war and home that separates Dai from his life at home: “That’s there … Different” (57). Three brief scenes of Bethan nursing a patient at the hospital illustrate the role of the British within the conflict more generally. When a DNA test reveals that the unresponsive man is an Iraqi flown to Britain by mistake, the play makes “a vague statement about universal victims of the war,” Mark Blankenship observes in his review. War obliterates individuality and calls into question established categorisations. The helicopters flying in from the battlefields signify a transgression of the border of home, symbolically challenging its definition of ‘us,’ of belonging. Furthermore, the scenes imply that the British role in war may be one of self-righteous retribution. Introducing the theme of the “cruel kindness” of euthanasia (Blankenship), Bethan suggests that medical life support in some cases might be inhuman: “Real love would have been to leave him. Hold his hand. Let him be” (13). Later, the disabled Dai begs his mother for this release from misery: “Smother me” (65). While Vi is unable to kill her son, Bethan performs the ‘act of mercy’ on her patient. Her act blurs the line between cruelty and kindness, because she may rather exact revenge here on the enemy who hurt Dai (Goetsch 138). Shocked and repulsed by Dai’s condition, she had exclaimed earlier: “I’m going to kill whoever did this to you” (45). If this is revenge, Bethan as representative of the home sphere is no less affected by the dehumanising impact of war than the soldier who, on the battlefield, loses the ability to see the other as human life worthy to be sustained: VI. If the crowds moved towards you, you shot at them. DAI. Yes. VI. Women, children. It was the only thing you could do. Afterwards, you saw their bodies swelling in the sun. There they are. No one, really. Just in the way. DAI. Yes. (63) The Iraqi patient’s unrecognisable face and his silence emphasise the ambivalence of Bethan’s act: What are her motivations? Is his death mercy or crime, love or cruelty? Home and war are both spheres in which death is imposed—but its justification is context-dependent. Importantly, it is war that finalises the loss of home in “Lichtenstein’s symphony of grief” (Roca). Distancing and traumatising,4 war prevents the reconnection of family members. Ultimately, they have to sell the farm and move to the city. Just as in Wish You Were Here, the farmhouse is turned into a weekend home for a London buyer—a negation of the long-lasting tradition of the farming family. After the relocation, Vi’s identity dissolves quickly: “Day in day out, all she ever does is clutch 4

For more details on the traumatic in The Pull of Negative Gravity, see Julia Boll (94-95).

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those bloody stones [her husband collected]. Drives me mad,” Bethan laments (68). The urban residence carries no meaning for the uprooted Vi who repeats: “There’s nothing.… I have nothing.… I am not here” (69). Alien to the city, she inwardly returns to the past home by drawing back into mourning: Grief becomes he space of belonging, making her “whole” (70). For Blankenship, the play’s “relevance is not in combat specifics but in the family’s perpetual loss.” For a while, the family struggles for continuity, most desperately by proceeding with the doomed marriage. But by the end, the family has vanished from home: Dai and Bethan are dead; Vi is lost to the here and now; and Rhys has started a family elsewhere. In The Pull of Negative Gravity, the odds are fixed: The home/front is a transitional state before the final dissolution of the British country home. Molly Davies’s A Miracle (2009) also links war to a defunct rural home. Here, the promise of the soldier son to rebuild the farm home is revealed as illusory: Gary, traumatised by what he witnessed on tour, conceals from his father that he is home on sick leave for no more than two weeks. Against this, A Miracle warily sets a more positive note. Life affirms itself against all odds in the miracle of the child of Gary’s friend Amy—a little girl alive and well despite her mother’s attempts to abort the pregnancy. Amy confesses: “That’s what you’re supposed to think about your child, ent it, it’s a miracle. Only she really is, cos I tried fuckin’ everything for it not to be this way” (50). A similar ‘silver lining’ is presented at the end of Days of Significance, a play that explores the invasion of war into a communal and urban home of two young working-class recruits. Other than The Pull of Negative Gravity, Days of Significance also spells out the idea of movement across the spheres on a structural level, taking the action from home to battlefield and back.

Departure and Return in Roy Williams’s Days of Significance Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007) is the one play in this study that makes some allowance for the interest in classical drama in the response to contemporary war on the British stage. Interested in “those who feel powerless” in the face of war, Roy Williams adapted Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing rather than one of the history plays (Introduction x)—the comedy’s young couples allowed him to sidestep policy-makers: The bantering Benedick and Beatrice become the cussing Trish and Ben; Hero and Claudio reappear as Hannah and Jamie. When the playtext of Days of Significance was revised for the 2008 production at London’s Tricycle Theatre, the link to the classic was strengthened (Munroe 252). Still, the play remains a rather loose adaptation.5 The theme of war, in particular, is much more prominent than in Much 5

Some critics discount the link to Shakespeare (Osborne 501; Duncan-Jones 366), but Kathryn Prince argues for a productive intertextuality between the plays; and for Dominic Cavendish, Days of Significance “pays plausible tribute to the source material.”

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Ado About Nothing. Roy Williams reverses the comedy plot that progresses towards “domestic harmony” to present a rather tragic decline “from romance to fractured friendships and death” as war powerfully disrupts the home (Clapp, “Army”). In act 1, Ben and Jamie, two soldiers about to be sent to Iraq, are among the clubbers of a typical Friday night out somewhere in England (by contrast, the men in Much Ado About Nothing recently returned from war). Act 2 deals with Ben’s front experience. The focus shifts back home in act 3 and to Hannah whose boyfriend Jamie, back from Iraq, faces allegations of prisoner abuse.6 Here, the 2008 version makes the most changes: The rather abstract series of one-on-one exchanges of Hannah with some of the characters from act 1 is reworked into a more coherent scene discussing her position towards war within the setting of a wedding reception. To Kathryn Prince, Days of Significance is “a record of … the way some of us live, in 2007.” And the setting was “instantly recognisable” for audiences as well (A. de Waal, Theatre 133). The “quite brilliant” first act (Shuttleworth, “Days”) was praised for its “shocking” (De Jongh, “17.1.07”) if “disorienting” (Reinelt 317), “disturbing but entirely persuasive” social realism (C. Spencer, “Passionate”). Hence, home is constituted in the ruthless portrayal of young working-class life “in the middle of a city centre somewhere in the south-east of England” (5/171).7 Despite the urban setting, this home is geographically and socially removed from the cultural centre of Britain. The Friday-night-out setting condenses the interaction within this underprivileged subsphere: The promenade staging of Maria Aberg’s 2007 production evinced the “dangerous energy of uneducated British youth” (Pizzato 141) and provided audiences with “satisfyingly uncomfortable moments” as they found themselves among the fighting and vomiting characters on stage (Prince). For Charles Spencer, the scene provides an “acute diagnosis of a generation that has lost its way in mindless hedonism and has only the most tenuous notion of what constitutes decent behaviour” (“Passionate”). Prince observes that “the characters behave just like many of the young adults living in my East London neighborhood” and recognises “their tough posturing and inane conversations occasionally punctured by something vaguely sensible.” This is a world of male and female self-display (A. de Waal, Theatre 132)—excessive, physical, verbally abusive, and frequently violent. An internal border runs through the homeland creating the “sharp opposition between two worlds” that Aleks Sierz identifies as characteristic of Roy Williams’s plays (“Two Worlds” 179; also, Ledent 296). College student Dan, who is linked to the antiwar protests in the cultural centre of London, opposes the uneducated recruits

6 7

The theme resonates with respective incidents at the time of the original 2007 production and the restaging at the Tricycle Theatre in 2008 (A. de Waal, Theatre 131). Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers are given for both versions (2007: pages 398/2008: pages 169-278); exact wording and punctuation of the later version may vary slightly.

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Ben and Jamie. Different positions towards war mark the rift between educated elite and working-class soldiers. Early on, a rivalry between Dan and Jamie is established: Two police officers interfere in their “drunken brawl” (5/171). Dan belittles Jamie and Ben, questioning their ability to reflect the implications of their upcoming deployment. Jamie answers only with a patriotic bromide: “Nothing little about serving your country” (9/175). Ben simply refuses to discuss the issue and devotes himself to the shallow purpose of the drunken night: “Can I have some alcohol please?” (10/176). Yet, the ignorance of the combatants-to-be is put into perspective and the play reveals its “powerful empathy” for the soldiers (P. Taylor, “Days”). Though Dan appears better informed, his position is not above suspicion. For Hannah’s stepfather Lenny, the play’s one parental character, the young clubbers, including Dan, are “fast food” (28/194), unable to grasp the scope of war. Dan, in turn, calls Ben and Jamie: “Fast food” (36/202). He thus subverts his credibility because his ‘educated’ statements are exposed as nothing more than rehashed phrases. Further, he appears to be guided by jealousy of Jamie’s friendship with Ben and relationship to Hannah rather than by political insight. What is more, Jamie’s ostensibly unreflecting attitude towards war is revealed as yet more complex in the course of act 1. In the presence of his male peers he is defensive, reticent, aggressive; but he confides in his love interest Hannah, telling her about the pressure he is under: “Look, I have to go. I don’t have a choice” (23/189). More telling still is his body language: When they dance together, “Jamie clings to Hannah like his life depended on it” (25/191). Here, his fear of the upcoming mission manifests. Corresponding to Claudio’s rejection of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Jamie breaks up with Hanna, falsely accusing her of telling their friends about his fears regarding his upcoming deployment. Yet, over the imminent threat of going to war at the end of act 1, the couples come together once again—not in a scene of harmony, but one of desperation. Here, the playful but rough teasing between Trish and Ben is suspended by war: BEN. Bad girl, Trish. TRISH. I can be good. BEN. Is it? TRISH. No more games. BEN. Trish … I need … TRISH. Me as well. (45/212) So far, the couple’s explicit banter had been a simplistic if “realistic” version of Beatrice and Benedick’s much more “effervescent wordplay” (Prince). Now it comes to a halt, and the action of act 2 follows Ben to the battlefield. Act 2 comes as “a tragic rupture in the lives of [the] working-class protagonists” (Ledent 297). Structurally, this ‘act of war’ disrupts the continuity between acts 1

5. Stage Plays

and 3 to turn a home in anticipation of war into a home/front marked by war. A video message from Ben to Trish, formally suspending the live performance of act 1, reveals how Ben’s connection to home deteriorates: The intimacy of the video message is soon spoilt by his jealousy and ultimately abandoned when his army mates gag Ben and take over the recording. In a brief address “to the nation,” they claim to be in control but are instantly contradicted by their own juvenile behaviour: “Now don’t you go worrying about a thing, UK, we’re looking after your interests here, on the side of the angels,8 telling the Arabs to their faces, yeah, ‘Oi, we’re British, behave yerselves!’” (50/216). Their “friendly torture” of Ben in the background foreshadows—and stands in for—the abuse of prisoners for which Jamie is held accountable later (Wierzoch 115). The play obscures what Judith Butler calls the grievability of the ‘other’ life (1): Iraqi suffering is substituted on stage with the suffering of the English soldier.9 If this casts the servicemen as victims, Days of Significance also problematises their racist rhetoric and aggressions in the war zone, rendering the title of act 2, “On the Side of the Angels,” an ironic comment on the role of the British at war (Ledent 297). When the soldiers come under fire, it turns out that the attack was provoked by Ben, who shot an Iraqi boy allegedly signalling to the enemy. Here and elsewhere, the play shows the “truly abysmal” “moral and intellectual emptiness” of the soldiers (Ledent 298). The 2008 version clarifies that it is war that spawns this “thoughtless barbarity and … inability to distinguish right from wrong” (Ledent 298). In the revised scene, Ben and Jamie take cover in an Iraqi alleyway where Ben gives way to his fears, demanding: “You want out of here alive? Go back to Hannah? When I tell you to shoot, you shoot, when I tell you to hold an Iraqi down, you … Don’t ever say no to me again, not out here” (222). Ironically, it is Jamie, the soldier charged with unlawful conduct later, who questions their role in the conflict: “You call that being a soldier?” (221). But when Ben accuses him of being on the side of the detested antiwar camp, Jamie “gives in” to Ben’s demand of loyalty—and his misrepresentation of what happened (222). This juxtaposition is absent in the 2007 version in which Ben is a more ambivalent character caught between his moral relativism and the anxious position Jamie occupies in the revision. The play, leaving them stranded in enemy territory without backup, suggests a shared responsibility of military and home sphere and, according to Bénédicte Ledent, “forces Britain into a critical confrontation with herself” (295). The play holds accountable a society that sends its soldiers to war unprepared (Billington,

8 9

The same idiom is used in Richard Bean’s On the Side of the Angels to problematise the imposition of British culture and values in the war context (A. de Waal, Theatre 197). See Ariane de Waal’s “(Sub)Versions of the Them/Us Dichotomy” for a discussion of the image of the enemy in Days of Significance and other plays; also, Bénédicte Ledent (303).

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“Days”).10 In his second video message to Trish at the end of act 2, then, Ben breaks down. He neither reconnects to Trish (Wierzoch 116), nor does the abusive language of act 1 help him to cope with the death of a fellow soldier: Mickey? He was on patrol yesterday and … face, boom, all over … side of the road … I mean, you just don’t need it. ‘Dass wat you get, motherfucker, get ready to die!’ Out here, wouldn’t fucking believe … Friday night out, it ain’t, you know it’s just … (Shakes his head.) He tries hard to find the strength to say more, but cannot. He just sits there and stares out, shaking his head at times. (68/239) The semiotics of home does not suffice to grasp the experience of war—or, as Jamie also puts it earlier in the revised version: “Friday night it ain’t” (222). Ben falls silent and ends the recording to leave a blank screen as the “potent symbol of his parting from … life” (Wierzoch 116). He will not return home. On closer inspection, the division into home and war is not as clear-cut as the macro-structure of the play suggests—even before the 2008 revision obliterates some of the stylistic differences between the acts. While in Aberg’s production the war scenes of act 2 were set above and separate from the stage on which actors and audiences had mingled before, “the violence of its action is clearly continuous with the brawling raucousness [of act 1],” Susannah Clapp notes (“Army”). Suman Gupta, too, detects “a tacit connection … between life in Britain and the experience of invading Iraq” in the play: “The violence that British soldiers engage in … appears as an intensification of the everyday violence that simmers in England, evident in the drink culture and abrasiveness of the first act” (101; also, S. Ryle 109). For Ariane de Waal, the play is about “the effects of the war in Iraq on British society in general” that span across the “alternating home and front settings” (Theatre 132). In Aberg’s production, a cross-fade from act 2 to act 3 realised war’s invasion of home on the stage: “as soon as the second video message had faded out, flickering flashlights came on in the British town-centre setting, and metallic sounds suggested that the raid announced by Ben was carried out ‘at home’” (A. de Waal, Theatre 136). War literally breaks in upon the British sphere. In act 3, Days of Significance returns to the setting of the English home town. As this is the most thoroughly revised part of the play, the emerging semiotic space

10

Others argue instead that the play blames the soldiers: For Quentin Letts, who writes for the Daily Mail, Days of Significance “leaves the … bitter taste of treason” (“Daily”); and on the theatre website Rogues & Vagabonds, Evie Rackham calls the drama “a dire indictment of a young generation out of control of itself. Thankfully, the play does not attempt to suggest that ‘we’—the big, anonymous, omnipotent ‘we’—have failed our youth. The youth in Days of Significance fails itself.”

5. Stage Plays

retains a special ambivalence. The impact of war transforms the sphere of belonging into an embattled home/front. It may be seen as an extension of the conflicted home of the opening act—and yet, the irruption of war at home provides its own momentum. The focus shifts to the civilian figure of Hannah, who is torn between college friends and working-class background. The 2007 production sent Hannah to the ‘frontline’ at home: She is placed in an arena, a square marked on the floor, to fight a series of verbal duels negotiating her position towards war. Though it is implied that these exchanges show her inner strife rather than actual disputes (Reinelt 319),11 the act’s abstract mode—“the abrupt shift from realism to this pastiche of vignettes … redolent of the rehearsal room” (Prince)—has been criticised.12 Hannah’s arguments are reworked within the wedding reception setting in the 2008 version, marking a shift towards the social-realist home sphere of act 1. Hannah, disputing with representatives of core culture (Dan), working-class home culture (Trish), and the military (Jamie) and urged to take a position by stepfather Lenny (family home), is overwhelmed by the demands war puts on her. She tries to flee the symbolic battleground: “I don’t want to think about these things at all. I don’t want that war to matter to me. I wanna go out, I wanna dance, I wanna get so fucking drunk …” (87/272). But war challenges her to take a stand: “You can’t go back, Hannah,” Trish notes in the earlier version (87). The stain left on her top in act 1 may be an early hint that, though she is not actively involved, she, too, is implicated in and hence ‘marked’ by the war. The educated “Blair-bashing” (82/254) centre is apparently not affected by war in the same way as the working-class community. College-educated Dan denounces the invasion of war into his world. He fails to attend Ben’s funeral, advises Hannah to “[f]orget him [Jamie]” (76/257), and in spite of his more analytical grasp of the political situation denies his own responsibility: “It doesn’t matter, Hannah, cos we don’t matter” (81/262). The hypocrisy of this position becomes clear when he proclaims Ben posthumously a war hero in the 2008 version: “So here’s to him, our friend, our hero. To Ben!” (249). This serves to obviate the need for someone at home to bear the responsibility for his death, while the surviving soldier is charged for what went wrong abroad. War thus deepens the rift at home. Repercussions of the conflict are deferred to the working-class subsphere—despite the fact that war and cultural core sphere are ruled by the same hypocrisy: When Hannah tells Jamie of her college friend Lauren who was caught plagiarising, the problem appears to

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This links Hannah to the protagonist of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, who inwardly and outwardly debates his undecided position towards the Iraq War (chapter 4.1.1.). Deirdre Osborne notes that the play and especially act 3 was reviewed as underdeveloped; she attributes this at least in part to “the pressure that … black British dramatists can face” from “(white) broadsheet reviewers” when their expectations are not met (502).

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be that the violation is exposed, not that it has been committed. Similarly, Jamie’s crime has been made public, while Ben’s part in the matter is overlooked. In act 3, Hannah matures from ignoring the war to “learn[ing] that it does indeed matter” (Roy Williams, Introduction x). She will eventually give in to her stepfather’s “voice of adult wisdom” (Ledent 297) that represents the “conventional expectation that Hannah will stand by Jamie, regardless of his culpability” (A. de Waal, Theatre 136). But his position is not uncritically presented as the answer to the dilemma of Britain at war. His inappropriate desire of his stepdaughter and his glorification of her throw doubt upon his judgement. Nor does Hannah herself emerge from her battle with Lenny unblemished; the revised version works out how she provokes him by resorting to the promiscuous behaviour of “Hannah the slapper,” as she was known in act 1 (23/189). She bluntly refutes Lenny’s expectation that she is “gonna make the world alright” (89/273). But ultimately, she does take the other way indicated in the title of the act, “A Parting of the Ways.” Hence, there is “some faith in the ability of education” in the play (Ledent 304), especially because towards the end it becomes clear that Dan, whose application of his education appeared dubious, actually dropped out of college. The play implicates that the civil sphere of Hannah is just as affected by war as the military life of Jamie: The individual is not solely culpable (Jamie), nor can a single life redeem the nation (Hannah). Then again, Dan’s claim that “we don’t matter” is also refuted; Hannah’s decision to accompany Jamie shows the possibility to ‘extend a hand’ (98/278) despite the rifts at home. The structure of war that is superimposed like a grid on Hannah’s experiential sphere in the stylised battle scenes of act 3 demonstrates that spatial references in plays dealing with stories of return in the context of contemporary war underline the focus on the semiotic construction of a home/front. The configuration of this meeting of war and home, however, takes on different shape in the plays and affects them on different levels.

5.1.2.

Border Spaces: Between War and Home

That the focus of the plays in the corpus is on the exploration of the cultural sphere of home is reflected in the choice of settings. Drama exclusively set abroad, such as D.C. Moore’s The Empire, is rare. The play consists of an extended scene in an Afghan compound where British soldiers await evacuation after battle. But rather than negotiating conflict between the warring parties, the play is about the confrontation of different British positions. Pitting against each other English higherand lower-class soldiers and a captive British Muslim, The Empire conceives of war as an internal tension extraverted to the foreign playing field of the occupation. Still, most of the dramatic material either juxtaposes domestic and foreign places or confines its action to home settings. While Days of Significance and How Many

5. Stage Plays

Miles to Basra?, for example, move between Britain and battlefield, The Pull of Negative Gravity, Molly Davies’s A Miracle, Tash Fairbanks and Toby Wharton’s Fog (2012) and other plays are confined to home settings ‘invaded’ by the homecoming soldier. The juxtaposition of settings is of course only indicative of the more general configuration of the spheres in these plays. Stephens’s A Canopy of Stars exemplifies how spatial distinctions may also be reflected on the level of dialogue to negotiate the effect of war on the home. In act 1, which is set at war, sergeant Jay dominates the dialogue; his subordinate’s share in the conversation is limited to short lines that mainly signal consensus. When the action moves back to Manchester in act 3, the alternating lines of Jay and his wife are monological in a different sense: They lack “the minimum consensus required for communication” (Pfister 129). The couple follows entirely unrelated threads of conversation, signifying war’s disruptive effect—until the wife points out how the same injustices the husband seeks to amend abroad are taking place at home and their exchange acquires at least some dialogic features. Site-specific performances, notably the London production of Adam Brace’s Stovepipe’s but also productions of Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, add another semiotic layer that references home culture even when the action is set abroad. Stovepipe, mostly taking place at and around a Jordan postwar-rebuilding conference as well as in the Iraqi war zone, only briefly moves on to Wales in the final scene. But the location of its 2009 production, the basement of a shopping mall, had its own implications with regards to British home culture: The audience entered the ‘war zone’ via a place of consumption that marked them as part of Western consumer culture (A. de Waal, Theatre 208). In his review, Ralf Remshardt attests to this coexistence of two spheres—the real-world home culture and the staged space of war—in the experience of Stovepipe: “I knew I was in the basement of a London mall, but I also was convincingly transported to a hotel in Amman” (274); and Remshardt extends this also to the play’s other settings (275). The production’s promenade character added yet another, symbolic layer: Audience movement in the space of performance and quick changes of settings created “a palpable allegory of the labyrinth of danger, power, and profit that is wartime Iraq” (Remshardt 275). The play consciously works out the idea of a passage between spheres not only by leading its audience to the vaults of the shopping mall, it also conceives of the Amman conference setting as a transitional sphere between home and war: “When a diver’s goin to the depths, … he stops for a minute or two, treads water. Lets his body get used to the conditions. That’s what Amman is for contractors. After Iraq. And before. We tread water” (24-25). Ending with the only scene set at home, even though chronologically it precedes the action set in Amman, Stovepipe spatially progresses towards home. Creating this trajectory, the play further implicates the audience’s involvement in the narrative of war. In the final scene, they are invited to sing along in the memo-

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rial service for the British contractor killed in Iraq, the ultimate ‘invasion’ of war into home life. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Belongings (2011) and Cat Jones’s Glory Dazed (2012), two more recent war dramas dealing with returning soldiers, show how theatre carries the negotiation of war into the second decade of the century. Theatre still feels the need to express the unsettling moment of war for home culture as a continuing story of crisis. The two plays illustrate a tension central to the idea of home/front in this study: War’s invasion from outside and the subsequent indistinguishability of home and war stand against gestures of separation, in other words, against the need to ‘close off’ home. Belongings demonstrates how the spaces of home and war are emphatically conflated on stage, whereas Glory Dazed contrives a distinct imagery for the resistance of home culture against the presence or acknowledgement of war at home.

Blurring the Boundary in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Belongings Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s tellingly entitled Belongings (2011) shows how the “sharply contrasting worlds” (Billington, “Belongings”) of war and home are established and abolished within the space of performance to negotiate the interrelatedness of the spheres and thus the British involvement in the war. Returning soldier Deb fails to reconnect to a home she no longer recognises: Her mother has left and her father Jim, who replaced the run-off wife with the much younger Jo, earns a living with pornography websites. The here and now of this home alternates with retrospective scenes in an army camp in the Afghan “wasteland of nothing-ness” (position 232) where, according to fellow soldier Sarko’s self-pitying remark, the British soldier is “an endangered species” (ps. 241-242), a victim of war. But when Deb fails to endorse his philosophical ramblings, he quickly demands “respect” (ps. 250). Both gendered subject positions13 and the British position at war are marked by this self-important attitude. Sarko’s failure to conceive of the queer identity of Deb reverberates with a failure to understand the ‘other’ elsewhere in the play. Deb knows that the Afghan women she searches have the same body underneath their veiled exterior: “I never once found anything other than what you’d expect. A body. Arms. Legs. Breasts” (714). And yet, they remain unreadable to her: “But have I got it wrong? … Or am I assumin’ right?” (ps. 718-719, 721). In any case, insight does not equal ethical justification in the play. It is Deb’s father who points out the similarities of their professions, pornography and war: “It’s all violence at the end of the day. Hurtin’ people. Getting’ power over people. We’re in the same business mate”

13

For Ariane de Waal, Belongings confronts “hegemonic masculinity and its ‘others’: femininity and homosexuality,” exposes “the rigidly dichotomised gender structures of militarism and war,” and “rescripts … narrative strands of the larger war story” (Theatre 257, 262).

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(ps. 316-318). The violence of war, then, is born out of the home, out of an attitude of power over the other whose difference nevertheless always remains inconceivable. In scene 9, the play fully suspends the “neat separation between the two spaces and temporalities” (A. de Waal, Theatre 257): “The distinction between Chippenham and Afghanistan gets blurred from here,” the stage directions specify (ps. 740). As home and war collapse, Deb’s civilian and military discussion partners alternate seamlessly. The dialogue of one sphere blends into and answers to bits of speech from the other, breaking down the distinction between home and military war system. Jo’s euphemistic account of her relationship with Deb’s father is dismantled when the porn-obsessed Jim reveals his sexist attitude: “What’s the point in havin’ a wife if you can’t have it on tap whenever you want it?” (ps. 862-863). Like her narrative, Jo “breaks down” (ps. 825-826). There are parallels to Deb’s situation: While Jo plays the role of happy housewife, the lesbian servicewoman performs the role of patriotic soldier at war (A. de Waal, Theatre 258). Not unlike her friend, Deb is raped by her mate Sarko, who shares her father’s disposition: “What’s the point in havin’ you out here if there’s not goin’ to be no perks?” (ps. 863-864). After the rape, “impassively” witnessed by Jo and Jim (ps. 870), the men leave the stage together. The conflation of the spheres in the space of the stage puts into concrete terms the interplay between professions, attitudes, and spheres in Belongings. A gesture of dominance encompasses home culture as well as military system and implicates the British position at war.

Inclusion and Exclusion in Cat Jones’s Glory Dazed Cat Jones’s Glory Dazed (2012), a “response to” discussions with imprisoned ex-soldiers (ps. 31), explores barriers erected at home against the invasion of war. The play is structured as a pattern of locking in and locking out of the ‘in’ sphere of belonging that is the stage—and the complicity of the copresent audience is indicated. The play, a continuous scene set in a Doncaster pub after hours, begins with returning soldier Ray insistently knocking on the door. He is admitted only to be ‘left out’ in another sense: Since he went to war, his ex-wife Carla and friend Simon have become a couple. His presence at home, signified by his portrait in uniform on the wall of the pub, has been erased—the picture is gone. Ray realises: “I came back and [my life] felt like it didn’t fit me prop’ly. Like I’d grown out of it” (ps. 934-935). The ex-soldier erects a ‘regime of terror.’ Locking the doors, he takes the others hostage. His attempt to win back Carla “just as fiercely as he once battered her” (Billington, “Glory”) is as futile as the unwinnable drinking game he plays with the naive barmaid Leanne; Carla refuses to let him into her life again. All the while, he is wanted by the police for physical assault: He is a fugitive in his own country. Carrying on the imagery of ‘locking in,’ the prison is introduced as the ‘natural’ or befitting place of the soldier at home: “Sometimes I sit on the banks of the Don

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at night and I can hear the blokes in the prison shoutin’ to each other. Sounds like barracks,” Ray points out at some point (ps. 1035-1037). As the scene unfolds, the brutalising effect of war transpires more clearly in the representation of the soldier’s position: First, he appears as a victim “get[ing] shot at in other people’s shitholes” (ps. 347-348); but Simon reveals later that his friend is a perpetrator who abused a dying Iraqi child. Bringing war home, Ray resorted to spousal abuse and beat a stranger almost to death, and he tries to set Simon on fire. Though Simon remains unharmed because, ironically, he dilutes the vodka Ray pours over him, the excess of violence links Ray to Danny, the soldier in Motortown, who actually implements the brutality of the battlefield at home. In Glory Dazed, Ray expresses the feeling of powerlessness that makes him resort to violence: He voices his desire to “be a lion” (ps. 1230) and to change his name, that is, his unhinged identity. Carla suggests ‘David’ (Cameron) or ‘Tony’ (Blair)—referring to the empowering position of policy makers. In the end, when Ray’s wrongdoings at war are exposed, he concedes: “I just lost the game” (ps. 1141-1142). He leaves the pub, symbolically locking the door behind him. The soldier is ultimately expelled from home—or, as Carla puts it, must be contained (locked up) upon his return home: “They come back in a box or off their box” (ps. 833-834). The high numbers of veterans in Britain’s prisons that inspired Cat Jones to write Glory Dazed (Frizzell) provide the play’s imagery of containment and exclusion that captures the failure of home to deal with the incursion of war. The play thus exemplifies the productive exchange between the factual and the imaginary in negotiating contemporary war on the British stage.

5.1.3.

Fact-Based Drama: The Reality of War

Written in reaction to the recent wars, all plays examined here reference reality. Like Glory Dazed, a number of plays use specific sources, such as interviews with those affected by war. The playtext of Stovepipe, for instance, mentions the input from private military contractors the author met in Amman (5). The selection and editing of such source material or the inspiration it at least provides offer a range of possibilities in between committing to the fictional or the factual. The line between fact and fiction may remain invisible to audiences as in the case of Glory Dazed14 or Stuff Happens (Soncini 103). Still, because fact-based modes are particularly prevalent in theatre on contemporary war, the possibilities of the factual will be considered by looking at Gregory Burke’s Black Watch and Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F. They are not documentary in the same way as the tribunal plays, but they make a more pronounced reference to realities beyond the stage than the 14

Cat Jones elaborates on the website IdeasTap: “It wasn’t about getting language or ideas down verbatim. I wanted a story that would allow us to explore the key ideas” (Frizzell).

5. Stage Plays

dramatic material addressed so far. Both plays reimagine interviews with real-life soldiers, often verbatim,15 within more imaginative, fictional frames.

Performing War in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch Commissioned for the founding season of the National Theatre of Scotland and first performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006,16 Gregory Burke’s Black Watch uses but is not dominated by verbatim dialogue. The action of the play revolves around four pub scenes, in which a playwright interviews a group of soldiers about their recent service in Iraq. Despite suggesting parallels to Gregory Burke’s own research process, the Writer rather embodies a notion of authenticity discussed in the context of verbatim theatre: to acknowledge “processes of theatrical mediation” within the performance (Megson, “Verbatim” 531; also, Hauthal 167; L. Taylor 234). The scenes alternate with flashbacks to the soldiers’ experiences in the field as well as scenes detailing the history of the Black Watch regiment, which “has been a crucial subject of identification for local communities over the last two centuries” (Boll 105). Though based on interviews with former Black Watch soldiers, the “energetic and vigorous” play deviates from the “still and restrained” verbatim mode: “This fact-based drama offers an understanding of … how and what war feels like for the soldiers … not by the sober and analytical recreation of the tribunal plays, but rather by spectacle, theatricality and pathos,” Lib Taylor writes (233, 231). The dialogue, then, is part of an imaginative dramatic narrative using diverse forms of theatrical expression “to deliver a jolt of urgency exclusive to the stage” (A. Green). Thus, Black Watch formally reflects a Scottish theatre tradition, as director John Tiffany explains: Fueled by variety, visual art, music, and a deep love of storytelling, Scotland’s artists have created a form of theater that is as significant and vital as its written drama. It features narration, song, movement, stand-up comedy, film, politics, and, above all, an urgent need to connect with its audience. It is often contemporary with world events and issues, although never dry and academic, and therefore deeply relevant…. It is a distinct form of theater of which Scotland can be very proud. (6) The relevance of Scottish identity for Black Watch is present on the formal level as well as in terms of subject matter. The “arresting” (Leach 180), if not unproblematic, staging of national identity has been the object of research, asking whether Black

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The play’s making-of, broadcast as “Theatre of War” (2012) on BBC Two and available on DVD, contains some of the original interviews quoted verbatim in the dialogue on stage. Black Watch won 22 awards (National Theatre of Scotland); its various productions and tours between 2006 and 2013 are listed in the playtext’s “Production Timeline” (xix-xxi).

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Watch is “oddly stirring” or “cynically defamiliarising” (A. Watson 235). The dispute is whether the play is able to view critically the Scottish role in Iraq or falls prey to “a totalising narrative of continuity through heroism” (Reid 195; also, Archibald, “History” 93). Franziska Quabeck eschews this controversy by arguing that Black Watch actually focusses on ethical questions concerning those caught up in war, not on politics (94, 96). The play is therefore interested in the more particular manifestation of war—“the individual consequences for the soldiers involved in the fighting” (Berninger, Henke, and Reitz 13)—and thus in a lower level of home. The set-up provides an interesting starting point for the interplay of home and war in Black Watch. It was originally staged in an old Edinburgh drill hall,17 “a large space with seating banks down either side creating an esplanade” (3).18 The location and the opening “[b]agpipe and drum Tattoo music … and moving saltire lights” referenced the annual Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo (Tiffany 7). The affective engagement of spectators is central to the performance of Black Watch: “the play enlists the audience … by using theatricality based on music, lighting effects, ritual movement and coups de theatre,” Lib Taylor writes (231). By modelling the setup on the famous drill show, the play casts the audience as an ‘actor’ and makes them aware of their own presence: Due to the esplanade seating, the other half of the crowd is always visible across the stage and, making the seating part of the set design, no physical boundary separates audience and actors (Hauthal 165). A voice-over welcomes the ticketholders to the drill hall and announces the spectacle of the Tattoo: the “unforgettable first sight and sound of the massed pipes and drums” (3). When ex-soldier Cammy is the first to enter the stage, he steps into the ‘home sphere’ of a Scottish community, embodied by the audience, which supposedly revels in military display and performance as a peaceful and immersive spectacle overriding the violent associations of war.19 Cammy’s hesitant entry, “comic, uncertain and embarrassed” (R. Robinson 395), breaks with the expectation of a sweeping entry of the Black Watch fuelled by the celebratory voice-over. Delivering a monologue riddled with pauses, Cammy expresses his reluctance to engage with the home audience: At first, I didnay want tay day this. Beat. I didnay want tay have tay explain myself tay people ay. Beat. (3) 17 18 19

Aspects of staging not documented in the published playtext are taken from the BBC recording (DVD) of Black Watch at Dingwall, Scotland in 2007 (BBC Press Office). Though similar venues were used on (inter)national tours (C. Robinson 13), the “subtle … satire” of the first location’s proximity to the Tattoo was lost (R. Robinson 397). For Rebecca Robinson, the Tattoo is a “tourist attraction”; however, this rather underscores its status as a performance and display of Scottish (military/ised) identity (395).

5. Stage Plays

He demarcates himself and his comrades from the people at home, who allegedly see the common soldier as pitiful, without prospects, and “exploited by the army” and who conflate professional combatant and wrongful war (4). Thus, from the start, an opposition of home and war experience is presented. Though aware of the bigger issue of the invasion’s flawed justification, the play explores the experience of the soldiers—actively involved in war but not responsible for it—by opening up possibilities for empathetic engagement with the combatants (Quabeck 96-97). Hence, it seeks to bridge the gap between soldiers and home community. Cammy closes his short opening monologue with the note that the soldier acts on behalf of the homeland. Early on in the play, he thus deconstructs the illusion that home and British warfare are separate: “That’s what you have a fucking army for” (4). The pub scenes locate the working-class soldiers on the margins of home culture whereas the middle-class Writer stands in as the onstage presence of the “audience as the privileged voyeur,” as Sarah Beck puts it (141). Class marks off those that fight from those that judge the war. But the soldiers’ isolation is not just a result of stigmatisation from the cultural core, they define themselves in opposition to people at home. Group identity is built on the performance of “the stereotype of the racist, sexist, homophobic squaddie” (R. Robinson 399). Still, this image is subverted by homoerotic allusions, the physical play with their bodies in the choreographies, and their accounts of camp life, which include a description of “toby tig … a game where you wait till someone’s daying something [and you] get your cock out and whack them on the puss way it” (24). The boundaries of group identity, “both confirm[ing] and contradict[ing] stereotypes,” are fluid (R. Robinson 399). From a home perspective, these boundaries are not as easily overcome. The Writer’s aim is “to know about your experience, what it was like for you. For the soldiers. On the ground” (7). His questions are answered reluctantly, underscoring the lack of understanding between civilians and military—and perhaps the soldiers’ own uncertain grasp of their traumatic experience (Oliver Belas in Aldea 274). Even after the Writer questions them about various aspects of army life and the experience of war, the interviewees deny that he is able to comprehend secondhand what they lived through: WRITER. (to Stewarty) I understand that. STEWARTY. No you fucking dinnay. Beat.… WRITER. I understand. CAMMY. You dinnay. Beat. But dinnay worry about it. (60-61) Referring to this scene, Hope Wolf comments on the (im)mediacy of experience: “Spoken stories, devoid of the sights, tastes, smells, and physical pain of real ex-

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perience, always dull the hammer’s blows” (in Aldea 276). But as live performance, Black Watch can provide a remedy: Shortly after, the play underscores with brute force how experiential knowledge about war can only be achieved firsthand. Physically attacking his interviewer, the returned soldier Stewarty threatens to break the arm of the Writer: “If he wants tay ken about Iraq, he has tay feel some pain?” (65). To transfer the experience from abstract dialogue to physical reality of the stage, the play compels its audience to witness this eruption of violence. The soldiers’ exposition to war’s atmosphere of violence recoils and irrupts back home. Much earlier, the play more literally and painfully opens up a ‘gateway’ between the two spheres. At the end of the first pub scene, the prop marking this location, a pool table with red baize, is left on stage lighted by a single spotlight. Cutting their way through the red surface with a knife, two soldiers hatch from the inside of the table. The red cleft of the ripped surface vividly conveys that this is a sort of ‘birth to war,’ bringing forth to the stage those two soldiers, Fraz and Kenzie, who are later to die on stage as well. The soldiers represent war as something that may be hidden below the surface of home but only manifests in the theatre of operations—or, indeed, powerfully on stage. The men then grab their guns and, back to back, cover each other against possible attacks from the dark unknown beyond the spotlight. It is, however, not an Iraqi enemy that appears but two British politicians. Placed on the scaffolding above the stage, they quarrel about the contested decision to send the Black Watch to the ‘triangle of death,’ a particularly dangerous sector of Iraq. This scene, bringing war to the stage, shows conflict as emerging in and from the sphere of belonging. Henceforth, the pool table doubles as pub interior and dummy for the confined inside of the ‘Warrior,’ an armoured vehicle used in Iraq. This scene draws on the idea of war as a game, an image also used in The Pull of Negative Gravity: By placing the soldiers on the rim of the games table, Black Watch highlights the make-believe quality of the scene and shows them as pawn in someone else’s ‘game of war.’ Here, the space of war is superimposed onto the pub space, the soldiers’ meeting place at home. The dimensions of the pool table serve as a benchmark to convey—by way of transfer or, in Lotman’s terms, translation (chapter 3.1.)—to audiences back home the spatially restrictive and physically exhaustive ‘pressure cooker’ situation in the vehicle. A scene presenting a similar situation introduces the war experience to audiences of the television series Occupation (chapter 6.2.). In Black Watch, the table-cum-Warrior, targeted by spotlights in the form of hairline crosses, illustrates the mentally exhaustive experience of constant threat from an unseen enemy. While the horizontal plane of the stage is assigned to the soldiers who fill this space with their bodily presence not only in the dance and drill routines, the elevated position on the scaffolding signifies distance and the drawing of semiotic boundaries. It separates the politicians at home from the men on the battleground. Harsh spotlights on the faces of the politicians create the impression that they

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‘float’ above the stage. The scene also adds the distancing effect of media representation: The faces appear on monitors and in a larger-than-life projection on the stage curtain. Furthermore, those giving and those receiving orders are also separated spatially. An Officer occupies the position on the scaffolding when he reads out e-mails to his wife back home that contain analytical and critical commentary about the homeland’s strategic military decisions. His assessment is contrasted with the lower-ranking soldiers’ visceral response to their situation. A difficulty to communicate verbally is emphasised in their reaction to letters from home: Silently they pass around the stack of mail and, scattered across the horizontal plane of the stage, resort to an intuitive sign language, their “own unique physical response” to their reading (Blumberg 86). Rarely the Officer descends to communicate with his men. And only after the death of three of the soldiers towards the end of the play does he begin to communicate more openly with his subordinates: CAMMY. It’s fucking knackered. Don’t you think it’s knackered, sir? OFFICER. It takes three hundred years to build an army that’s admired and respected around the world. But it only takes three years pissing about in the desert in the biggest western foreign policy disaster ever to fuck it up completely. Beat. But you didn’t hear that from me. (71) Only here, in the penultimate scene, does he transcend the semiotic rift established between the military ranks. On just a few occasions, the soldiers themselves ascend the scaffolding placed at the ends of the stage. In one scene, Fraz and Kenzie sing from above a traditional song about “Twa Recruiting Sergeants,” who plead: “Sae list my bonnie laddie and come awa wi’ me” (49). The alluring effect of the concerted male voices—which Terry Allison found “particularly moving” (in Aldea 275)—enacts the seduction of the young recruits. Though the men’s position marks a hierarchic border traversing home, it no longer appears impenetrable. In fact, the duplicitous song, delivered by the two soldiers doomed to die, is well suited to the location above the stage. At the same time, the scene exposes the dissonance of the song’s promises and the reality on the ground when the singers descend to the stage to go on patrol through enemy country. In another scene, the servicemen comment from above on the spectacle of an American bombardment on the horizon; respective footage is displayed on the monitors. For Martin Ramey, this scene reveals Black Watch as “anti-American,” reducing “American soldiers … to an absence” (in Aldea 277, 278). But the purpose here is rather to illustrate “the instability of [the Scottish soldiers’] own sense of self,” Lisa Mansell notes (in Aldea 277). She contextualises the ostensibly anti-American rhetoric with the dismissive language the Scots use to create group identity. Their strikingly stereotypical derision of the US soldiers is the ex negativo performance

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of their own sense of belonging: “This isnay fucking fighting,” Cammy criticises the American excess, “This is just plain old-fashioned bullying like” (40). And this ‘bullying’ is exactly what troubles him about their own role in the conflict—what denotes ‘us’ and ‘them’ actually overlaps: CAMMY. After a while, it’s more bullying than fighting ay. STEWARTY. You dinnay join up tay bully cunts day you. (48) The Officer, too, underscores the fragility of the group identity when he bemoans that the Black Watch is about to be dissolved. For him, the decision made at home may “erode the bonds that connect the regiment to those places which have for the last three hundred years provided [its recruits]” and promises to “be a disaster for both the British Army and the country as a whole” (42-43). Decision makers directly interfere with the identity of the soldiers. While the play signifies the constitution of distinct (sub)spheres, it also undermines boundaries by suggesting an interconnectedness. Home and war also merge emphatically in the scenes of song, dance, and other choreographed, nonrealist forms of representation (Hauthal 147). Black Watch begins by withholding the military entertainment of the Tattoo, a performance that obscures war’s brutality. Later, musical performance is used to reinscribe war into the theatrical experience: A choreography accompanies the performance of “The Gallant Forty Twa,” in which the men dance with their rifles; they do not simply present the weapons as in the Tattoo, however, but aim at an unseen enemy. The performance then blends into the next pub scene: As the singing continues, ever more soldiers leave the stage and reappear in civil clothes, wheeling in the props signifying the pub. This transition from war into home setting is soon reversed, accelerating the exchange between home and war spheres in the play: As the Writer interviews the soldiers about their reasons for joining up, a recruiting officer from the Great War period, Lord Elgin, bursts in. The sudden irruption of war also constitutes a temporal shift that sets the patriotic enlistment campaign of World War I against, and also in contact with, the individualistic motivations of today’s young men. Lord Elgin seduces Cammy with another one of the Black Watch songs that were brought to the rehearsal process of the play (Tiffany 7): Two soldiers force the reluctant recruit into a chair to listen—until he succumbs to the allure of the concerted movements, signalling the spirit of military comradeship, and joins in. Now part of this community, Cammy narrates the identity-establishing history of the Black Watch. While he gives his ‘lecture,’ he is changed out of his civil clothes and into and out of different historic uniforms by his mates, who work together like “a squad assembling and disassembling a military cannon” (30). The scene emphasises the subjection of the combatant to the forces of history. A number of scholars find fault with this selective “grand narrative” (Archibald, “History” 93) or “totalising narrative of

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continuity through heroism,” as Trish Reid puts it (195). But Franziska Quabeck points out that the production itself demonstrates that this history is “tainted and prone to gradual destruction” when it cites the decision made by the authorities at home to dissolve the Black Watch in a conjunct Scottish regiment (94). Despite this subjection, the soldiers are very active on stage, even aggressive, as the scene “Ten-Second Fights” underscores. As tempers boil up in the confined interior of the Warrior, the Sergeant suggests hand-to-hand fights to relieve tension. These turn into a performance oscillating between bar fight, graceful dance, and drill routine as the men momentarily line up and move in unison. Thus, the choreography suggests a continuity between the playful pugnacity at home and war’s ‘rules of engagement.’ Violence, though taking different forms, is always regulated. This link between the individual aggression and the aggression of war resounds with Cammy’s growing unease about their role in the war, which he identifies as ‘bullying.’ In the end, the play finally delivers the Tattoo performance heralded in the beginning. But the musical drill does not withhold the realities of war like its formalised real-life counterpart. In Black Watch, the soldiers struggle to keep up: They fall, get up, resume their routine, fall again, until the drill disintegrates altogether. The choreography ends on the sound of an explosion that freezes the soldiers in movement, leaving them spread across the stage in their individual positions, abandoning the order of the regimental drill. It is important to note the play’s affective potential to touch the spectators through these performances (Hauthal 172). On this level, the play seeks to ‘bring the war home,’ that is, make the experience of war conceivable for the audience. Initially, the home audience lacks the firsthand experience of war and thus fails to understand the soldiers. But the emotive musical and physical performance of the actor’s bodies on stage brings them closer. Lib Taylor discusses in detail the strategy of ‘audience enlistment’ through rational, observational, and emotional modes (228). For her, Black Watch demands as much physical and emotional energy as any In-Yer-Face performance, and wrings as much anguish and feeling from its audience. It is both a commentary on a real event and an affective theatrical event, and it invites awareness of effort, commitment and truth in each of those respects. (231) What Lib Taylor credits primarily to the use of postdramatic elements, Janine Hauthal extends to the play’s verbatim dimension (171-172). This tradition adds metatheatrical elements like the Writer and audience address for a “theatrical immediacy” that creates a “shared intimate experience” of the initially alienated groups of soldiers and spectators. It is this affective engagement that Hauthal sees as the ‘reality’ or ‘truthfulness’ of Black Watch (173). The play, then, turns on the idea of a theatrical experience to facilitate an understanding of war as lived experience that displaces the mediated, distanced access

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of the home audience to war as a contemporary phenomenon. To make sense of war as a reality of British life, the dramatic performance works to reintroduce war to the home sphere. For this purpose, it employs the soldiers as figures travelling in between home and war zone. The absurdities of war—the injustice of the invasion, the subjection of the soldier to decisions made by others, the untimely amalgamation of the regiments—are not subject to negotiation in Black Watch. What is played through is how the individual experience within this larger framework of war may be used to understand war as a collective reality of contemporary life. The play achieves this by first asserting boundaries within the home sphere; it then demarcates zones of influence of war and reveals these boundaries on different levels of the dramatic performance as fragile and permeable. Members of the creative team of Black Watch noted that in the rehearsal process the actors received factual and testimonial input from former soldiers and an embedded journalist and viewed footage from the war zone (S. Beck 138, 142, 143). A sergeant major also taught them parade marches (Tiffany 7). Still, the production employs professional actors who reenact these real-life ‘voices.’ And while their presence on stage is certainly affective, the presence of the bodies in the performances of The Two Worlds of Charlie F. is still of a different quality: Sheers’s play casts former soldiers—and many of them visibly impaired—to perform “fictionalised versions of themselves” on stage (Nestruck).

Theatre as Therapy in Owen Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F. Owen Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F., initiated by the Masterclass Trust of the Theatre Royal Haymarket and premiering in 2012, is a production of Bravo 22 Company, “a pioneering theatre recovery project” for wounded, injured, and sick service personnel (Masterclass Trust). Using song and dance, direct audience address, and video recordings, the play tells the stories of soldiers who left the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq with a diagnosable mental and/or physical impairment—and, according to Alice Jones, “makes for an evening of rare, raw power.” The play is comprised of episodes from fifteen fictionalised biographies based on real-life accounts arranged in a story arc of going to war and returning home. Casting wounded veterans, the production brings to the stage the physical reality of bodies harmed by war and thus operates on an idea of immediacy not present in Black Watch. As Ariane de Waal notes, the injured body, interfering with the audience’s immersion in a dramatic illusion, has an affective potential that demands empathetic engagement as it is always “both within and beyond the world of the play,” at once performing and performed (“Staging” 19). Yet, as a negotiation of the British experience of contemporary war, The Two Worlds of Charlie F. brings together the worlds of home and war on various levels: Through the performance of the injured amateur actors, in the two-act structure, and in the arrangement of the specific scenes the play

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explores the impact of war on the home. In the focus on the injured British individual, war takes the shape of an indistinct violent force (or fate) unconnected to its political context. The ‘two worlds’ of the title have inspired various readings, such as J. Kelly Nestruck’s reference to the opposition of ‘story world’ and the world of the actors’ performance. He observes also that these levels of “representation and reality overlap and blur” in the play. Nestruck sees a rift between soldiers and “those who only read about [war] back home” running through the play. Structurally, it is divided into a “before-and-after” separated by the traumatic experience of war, Robert Cushman notes. Broadly speaking, the two acts represent the processes of going to war and returning home. All of these distinctions are determined by war interfering with the integrity of some form of home, belonging, or self. The play thus “distinguishes the conflicting realities [of] the ‘two worlds’ of war and home” (Wierzoch 118). The location of the boundary shifts in the course of the action as a process of negotiation is at work in The Two Worlds of Charlie F. Starting with war as a traumatic caesura in the life of the soldier, the play presents a home sphere that ranges from the smallest unit of home, the experience of self as a unity of body and mind, to the universal ‘one world we live in’ invoked by the character of Charlie F. in his final speech. The play begins with “an earth- (and nerve-) shattering explosion that informs us immediately that we are going to enter the war zone” (Turner). This is not Afghanistan but the battlefield of a mind traumatised by war: Presented as a shadow play, the first scene introduces the subjective reality of the hospitalised Charlie. Dazed by medication, he considers himself to be at war and under torture from the Taliban. War is thus first manifest in Charlie’s mind: “you have to understand I wasn’t in that hospital bed,” he says, “as far as my fiancée and my mother were concerned I was there. Their Charlie was, back. But at the same time he wasn’t” (11). But war is also inscribed on Charlie’s body. During his first monologue, he presents his stump to the audience, a visibly mutilated “body of evidence”; but he also creates a “counterbalance” (A. de Waal, “Staging” 20, 21) as he calls up memories of pain from childhood that mediate the affective force concentrated in the ‘unbearable’ sight of the irreversibly damaged body. He further employs humour and self-mockery to connect with his audience and contextualises his unsettling war experience: historically by referring to conflict from the Napoleonic wars onwards and geopolitically by identifying as Canadian. He appeals to the Commonwealth community to connect with his British audience: “thanks to your industrious forebears we’re all in this Afghan shit together” (12). Against this historico-political backdrop, he extends the home sphere to those present at the theatre. Without a marked transition, apart from Charlie’s suddenly military demeanour, scene 2 introduces the “Histories” of fifteen soldiers injured mostly in Afghanistan. Joining Charlie on stage one after the other, the soldiers report

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in a military staccato their regimental affiliation, rank, injury, and rehabilitation status. Their voices merge into a polyphonic chorus of a “regiment of the wounded,” as Charlie calls them in his closing monologue (85). In scene 4, the story of this (postcolonial) community is fed by the story of Simi, a Trinidadian soldier, whose narrative, however, remains a fragment. Her disappearance in act 2 is unexplained and “disappointing…” (Nestruck) and her voice remains marginal both for its ethnicity and gender. The only other female soldier in the play, Becky, also does not emphasise her gender nor is she cast in a specifically female role, such as wife, girlfriend, or mother. Thus, notwithstanding the appearance of two servicewomen, male and female roles are traditionally assigned to combatant and domestic functions respectively. From scene 3 onwards, the play follows the recruits from the sphere of home to war via the transit zone of the military: From the scene of “Joining” they will progress towards enemy “Contact” at the end of act 1. Gradually, the soldiers adapt, in mind and body, to the demands of war. Similar to Black Watch, The Two Worlds of Charlie F. uses a drill routine to bring the characters ‘in line’ with military logic. Such elements of dance and movement and, indeed, the entire performance of the amateur actors may not be executed as convincingly as respective scenes in Black Watch, but they are nonetheless effective. In his review of Sheers’s play, Andy Smart notes that “[the ex-soldiers] were not trained to act, they were trained to fight, which makes their performances all the more extraordinary, all the more moving.” The actors’ obvious handicaps add a specific emotive appeal: “It’s an unforgettably eyeopening experience to know that you’re watching so much more than a play,” Veronica Aloess writes. From a more self-reflexive position, Ariane de Waal observes how she “felt gently coerced” by the performance on stage: While I seemed to share a tear-filled sympathy for the performers who held our gaze with many of my fellow audience members, I found myself bound to the soldiers on the terms of an emotional contract I had been neither able to negotiate nor dissociate myself from. (“Staging” 27) For the audience, there is an affective confrontation with the soldiers’ visible injuries then. The amateur acting is countered by “the undeniable presence of the actors’ injured bodies” and the play uses its “amateur qualities [to engage] the audience to get involved with the (hi)stories presented on stage” (Wierzoch 123). In fact, the performance of the amateur actors is usually excluded from critique aimed at the play. While diagnosing structural deficits, Nestruck sees the real strength of the play in the authentic soldier-actors whose performance is sometimes “chilling,” sometimes “lighthearted and touching.” The need of some critics to especially recognise the “suffering” of the amateur actors (Ouzounian; also, A. de Waal, “Staging” 28) also attests to the specific affective impact of the injured body.

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Like Black Watch, The Two Worlds of Charlie F. introduces a lesson in military history. Placed in front of a large map, an officer narrates Afghan history as a continuity of British (and Russian) withdrawals from a basically undefeated country. The lecture provides a backdrop against which the soldiers-to-be form a “new military identity”; they “are monopolized by and integrated into the historical narrative” of war (Wierzoch 119). Addressing the audience, the officer also implicates them in this process. Next, the military domain takes hold of their bodies. During a “Field Medic Course” one of the soldiers is literally turned into a “puppet” (30) for the purpose of war. With a red marker, an instructor maps out on the naked body of the soldier the potential impact of coming under fire. Again, the affective potential of the real bodies comes into play. The audience knows at this point that the potential injuries the instructor lists have already taken effect: The bodies of the actors are already maimed by traumatic injury. Hence, the scene assumes an affective “‘prophetic’ quality” at the intersection of dramatic retrospection and here and now of the performance (Wierzoch 120). Other than in Black Watch where military agency is embodied by senior functionaries like the Officer or Lord Elgin, military authority in The Two Worlds of Charlie F. remains a rather abstract force. The fifteen soldiers do not form a closed section as the soldiers in Black Watch or any other coherent military unit organised by hierarchy. Occasionally, their stories intersect for a moment as they take on different functions in the scenes which follow the stages of a military biography. Overall, however, their stories run parallel rather than as a combined narrative. Like the transit sphere of the military, war is an abstract force rather than the manifestation of a political process or the targeted aggression of an enemy to be held to account. Speaking from the perspective of the soldier in the field, Charlie presents war as “playing Afghan roulette” (45), a matter of chance, a fate dependent on nonhuman forces. The enemy is not blamed for the life-changing injuries and traumas of war. Enemy combatants are either described as “ghosts” (46), marking them as an ‘absence,’ or briefly as demanding the “respect” of being highly effective professionals doing a “really, really good job” (45). Even in the major’s briefing the present British deployment is narrated as an episode in the “Great Game” (28) of war in Afghanistan in which present ‘players’ (not least the British forces) have little impact on the historical continuity of conflict: Afghanistan has always been a strategic crossroads for the region, and in today’s operating environment its neighbours Pakistan and Iran both have significant interests in the country. Some of the players have changed but the playing field remains the same. (29) The Two Worlds of Charlie F. does not critically reflect the British presence in this playing field, either in the past or today. Nor is the play interested in negotiating

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the role of the British as aggressors on either the stage of politics (the decisionmakers) or in the theatre of war (the soldiers themselves). Instead, the play focusses on the soldiers as war victims (also, A. de Waal, “Staging” 17). Structurally, the first act tells the story of entering into war, but the messy reality of the traumatised mind haunted by the past unprocessed memory does not allow for an entirely neat synchronisation of act structure along the lines of before and after. Approaching the moment of contact with the IED in scene 9, the play introduces the Psychologist to frame the narration of the traumatic event. The fact that The Two Worlds of Charlie F. was conceptualised as a “rehab-come-therapy project” (Cushman) that uses “the performing arts as recuperative therapy” (Ouzounian) may account in part for the fact that the play fails to acknowledge the essential “incommunicability of … traumatic memory” (A. de Waal, “Staging” 21). Instead, the fictional world of the play works as a “safe mode for retelling and re-enacting … traumatic experiences” (A. de Waal, “Staging” 20) to come to terms with a traumatic rupture. Scene 9, as documented in the playtext, at least acknowledges the atemporal presence of traumatic memory: During the therapy session “a man with a Vallon mine-detector occasionally passes [Charlie and the Psychologist]” (43). He is, of course, a manifestation of a haunted mind reliving the incalculability of contemporary war exemplified by the invisible threat of roadside bombs: “war is ever ‘still there’ in [the] lived temporality” of Charlie’s reality (Wierzoch 121). The second act can be read as a reversal of the first. Up until now, war was inscribed into the mind and onto the body of the soldier. Now, in the first scene of act 2, Charlie finds himself in physiotherapy back home in Surrey: So yeah, this is, I guess, our new drill square. The physios our new PT instructors. The doctors, consultants, our majors and generals. Prosthetics, wheelchairs, meds, our new kit. The operations our, well, new operations.… I mean, a few weeks ago I was a steely-eyed dealer of death. Then, wham, bam, thank you mam, and I’m in this circus. (54-55) Act 2 repeats the adjustment process of the first but inverts and problematises the movement or transition from the sphere of war back into the reality of home. “The only problem is,” Charlie had stressed in the beginning, “that when you come back [home from the war zone] that quick not all of you comes back at once” (11). Indeed, the second act shows how the semiotics of war are still in effect for the soldiers after their return, which necessarily creates problems of translation in Lotman’s terms because the logics of war must fail at home. The song and dance performances convey the idea that the trauma of war is constantly relived. Though physically the soldiers are at home, mentally they are reliving the war time and again. A physiotherapy exercise reminiscent of the drill routine of act 1 is disrupted by a sudden explosion that transports the patients back to the battlefield. Scattered across the stage, the actors instantly take on the roles of Afghan casualties killed by the ex-

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plosion. As in Days of Significance, however, the loss of Afghan life is not presented as “visible or knowable”; the casualties are not recognised as ‘grievable life’ (Butler 51). Instead, war and home space—past experience and present suffering of the British soldiers—conflate on stage. Two soldiers in full battle dress appear and walk among the lifeless Afghan bodies. Yet, they do not react to this loss of life at all but only acknowledge the bodies in their former British roles as convalescents as they comment: “when some of us come back from Afghan, Afghan stays with us. Or us with it. You walk these corridors at night and, believe me, you’ll hear a bit of Afghan behind every door. Sangin … Kajaki …” (56). The patrolling soldiers locate themselves in the rehabilitation facility in Surrey, reading the aftermath of the explosion in the war zone as a memory troubling ‘our’ returnees. Soon, the casualties awake again to their roles as disabled British veterans whose life back at home is marred by their war experience. They sing: “It’s not re-living it. It’s living it. You’re in it. You’re there, doing it” (57). The effects of trauma—such as sleeplessness, irritability, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse leading to an inability to take care of their children—come to affect not only those who went to war but also the female relatives who sing along. The traumatic reliving turns into ‘living with’ the repercussions of war as a daily reality. The process of readjusting to the home sphere in The Two Worlds of Charlie F. is also dominated by the defamiliarising effect of war. Home beyond the rehabilitation centre, the transit zone between war and home, is experienced as “Enemy Territory” (scene 2.7). This scene replaces the mode of live performance with the documentary medium of the video record: The faces of three testimonials are projected onto gauze to bear witness to their sense of alienation.20 For them, going out into public space is experienced as another fearful patrol of enemy territory. Home appears as an environment they can no longer understand nor fill with meaning. Before this scene, Charlie had already noted his inability to reconnect with his fiancée and the catch-22 situation of taking medication to cope but then dealing with its heavy side effects. He confesses to his therapist: “I really … want to square this one away but I can’t. It’s a whole second tour, Doc.… And I don’t know if I can do it. I mean, I’ll storm a fucking compound tomorrow. Even with one fucking leg. But this tour. I’m outnumbered” (74). At this point, the play resorts to the nonverbal communication of dance to suggest the hope and possibility of a reintegration at home. Aloess highlights this choreography as particularly affective: “actresses dance with the men that use wheelchairs, seeming to act as their legs as well as expressing both the intimacy and yet distance between the couples during rehabilitation.” Ariane de Waal, too, notes this dance as the strongest moment of show20

However, the nonprofessional acting reveals them as performed. The actor’s bodies are still the strongest testimony to the reality of war in the production. The play’s making-of “Theatre of War” uses documentary conventions to tell the actors’ real-life stories.

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ing the injured soldiers’ physicality: “The disabled performers appear dignified and strong, fully capable of holding and steadying their dance partners. The aesthetic representation … foregrounds what they are still able to do” (“Staging” 27). At the end of act 2, the play seeks to reconcile the soldier, characterised by his battle-worn body and mind, with his sphere of belonging. For most of the second act, meaningful life at home cannot be achieved as the returned soldiers apply the codes they adopted to function in the war zone. In the final scene, however, Charlie comes to translate a code of war successfully into his life back at home. Thus, war will have not only an enduring effect on his body but will support his continued existence at home. In his closing speech, he speaks of his “re-engagement” with “the oldest regiment there is. The regiment of the wounded” (85). Redefining himself as part of this community, he finds a new place in his old home sphere. The idea of a military collective and its connotations of a distinct comradeship taken from his war experience is the code newly introduced to his civilian life. A meaningful existence at home is now informed by war: Home has become a home/front that will extend beyond the duration of the conflict. To reinforce this new semiotics, he backs it with a narrative that refers to the major’s earlier lecture in military history but reads it in mythological terms: “It’s a regiment with an illustrious history that goes back to the earliest days of mankind” (85). Yet, the play does not leave it at that. Charlie also conflates the worlds of the audience and the ‘regiment of the wounded’ when he addresses the audience in a sentimental twist that overrides the rift captured in the play’s title: “Because we don’t live in two worlds, do we? We live in one” (85). Speaking as the ensemble gathers on stage, a heterogeneous crowd of civilians and veterans on crutches and in wheelchairs (no prosthetics cover their injuries in this tableau), Charlie includes the soldiers’ dramatic characters and real-live selves as well as the present audience and the global community in his appeal (Wierzoch 123). While Black Watch more actively enlists its audience in a theatrical experience to provide access to and thus an understanding of the war experience, The Two Worlds of Charlie F. aims at a comparatively passive appeal supported by the affective presence of the injured body. The soldier-actors speak, often with humour, with the testimonial authority of the victim of violence and trauma (e.g., Chakravarti; Laub 57-58). As victim-witnesses, they gain the sympathies of audiences. The final rendering of a home/front community, however, rests on the effect of its sentimental presentation (A. de Waal, “Staging” 27). Inexplicably, it recruits from a global community—“Britain. America. Africa. Iraq. Afghanistan. Men. Women. Children” (85)—that is not (or hardly) present in the play itself. What is more, because in the play war as a disembodied force is assigned to no agent in particular, the unified ‘we’ evoked by Charlie is also a world of victims not agents. And it is a world for which there is, in essence, no end to war: “And until we stop fighting,” Charlie states without suggesting how this could be achieved, “[the regiment of the

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wounded is] going to keep on growing” (85). Supported by its telling rather than showing mode of presentation, the conclusion takes the play further away from reflecting the active role of the British in the recent military conflicts. Exploring the alienation and reintegration of the traumatised individual, the play steers towards creating an afflicted home/front community merely coping with or adjusting to war.

5.1.4.

Civilian Perspectives: Private Lives at War

Like The Two Worlds of Charlie F., most plays on contemporary war in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with military characters or communities, while comparatively few are set in civilian or private contexts. Suman Gupta’s subchapter on domestic drama takes into account just two plays: Tamsin Oglesby’s US and Them (2003) and David Hare’s The Vertical Hour (2006). Both address war as a strain on the Special Relationship between Britain and the United States. For Gupta, the plays were “entirely of the time” in focussing on transatlantic differences to reaffirm the ‘imagined community’ of the British nation, in Benedict Anderson’s sense (122-123). US and Them, which premiered just weeks after troops entered Iraq, addresses the war only in a brief dispute, but this scene, Gupta argues, provides “a fairly subtle reading” of the dynamics between the UK and the US in the context of the Iraq War (121). Aleks Sierz agrees that the play is “an appealingly clear account of tensions between Brits and Yanks” (Rewriting 91). More pointedly, Kritzer argues that even as these tensions turn into open resentment, the play suggests that Americans and Brits are doomed to be closely connected (Political 213): After a disagreement, the couples in US and Them break contact but are forcedly reconnected when their children announce the arrival of their binational offspring, a grandchild that figuratively represents the long-term consequences of the transatlantic alliance.

Special Relationships in David Hare’s The Vertical Hour Similarly, an “international conflict is … played out in miniature” in David Hare’s The Vertical Hour (Bassett, “The Vertical”). The stage play, which was first produced in New York in 2006, pits British antiwar liberalist and physician Oliver against American prowar academic Nadia, who left her job as war correspondent for a chair in political sciences. Partner to his expatriate son Philip, she visits Oliver’s home in the countryside on the English-Welsh border. This internal geographic separation line echoes the interpersonal rift between father and son. Their “lovehate relationship” (Klein), revived in the rivalry for Nadia, stands in for opposing positions within Britain: The father’s self-imposed exile in the country is a retreat into an essential Britishness—in express analogy to “[la] France profonde” (26)—and

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underscores British insularism21 ; the son’s fascination with Nadia, on the other hand, signifies the emphasis on the Special Relationship. An actual exchange across national and political boundaries is reserved for the “articulate” conversations of Nadia and Oliver (Nightingale). Nonetheless, their debates bring change to the American only. At the end of a nightly talk, the inconsequentiality of her beliefs and actions literally dawns on Nadia: The “various shadings of purple-blue background” of the set in the 2008 London production (Letts, “The Vertical”) marked the transition not only from night to day but also from illusion to self-knowledge and represented the “Freudian catharsis” of the conversation (P. Fisher, “The Vertical”). As a consequence, Nadia decides to break up with Philip and to return to reporting from Iraq—a development dismissed by reviewers as unconvincing (e.g., De Jongh, “23.1.08”; Hart, “21.1.08”). To Englishman Oliver, the wrongfulness of the invasion is self-evident. His voluntary exile and the unsparing matter-of-factness with which he treats his patients may be taken as a comment on Britain’s foreign policy in the case of Iraq: A few years ago, Oliver had been in a car accident, “signal[ling] right, intending to go left” (3). The head-on collision that kills two thus illustrates Labour’s strategy of war: Oliver’s representation of the accident may either be understood as a comment on the errant ways of well-meaning leftist politics or, when Oliver inverts the phrase later on, as a wilful aberration of a government outwardly “signall[ing] left” but really “intending to go right” (95). As the example of The Vertical Hour reveals, domestic drama often reverts to figurative representations of contemporary war invading the home of civilian protagonists who cannot claim a traumatic combat experience or the loss of a loved one on the battlefields. This propensity for a metaphorical presence of war in the British family home also characterises Sarah Helm’s stage play Loyalty (2011) and Mike Bartlett’s play Artefacts (2008), which can also be subsumed as domestic plays on contemporary war.

Home Politics in Sarah Helm’s Loyalty With her play Loyalty (2011), journalist Sarah Helm presents an “essentially domestic drama” (Gee), though this “fictionalised memoir” (Maxwell) is embedded in the political context of Britain’s decision to go to war in Iraq. In the play, the author—partner of Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Chief of Staff at the time—appears as a version of herself, Laura, whose husband’s professional loyalties to the PM bring the politics of war into their home: “crucial affairs of state crash into [their] bedroom” (Hemming). Based on Helm’s own experiences, the play is caught “between the stools of drama and documentary” (Shenton), never identifying “what is true and what 21

For Tim Auld, this insularism includes a sense of disaffection: “Paradise? Not a chance. This is Britain, the sacred Isle of simmering middle-class discontent and sour, wine-stained countryhouse weekends” (54).

5. Stage Plays

isn’t” (Hemming). Moreover, Loyalty may focus on civilian life but not quite on the common (wo)man. Through her partner Nick, Laura has an exclusive insight into what is going on in British politics. Hence, reviewers see parallels to Stuff Happens (Letts, “Loyalty”; C. Spencer, “Loyalty”). Like Hare’s play, which “reintroduces fiction into the formal model of verbatim” by alternating between documented dialogue and imagined ‘off-the-record’ sequences (Soncini 100, 103-104), Loyalty is about the scenes behind the scenes of politics as experienced and reworked into fictional drama by Helm. Like Stuff Happens, Loyalty overrides the distance between the sphere of politics and the common Briton that is much more clearly separated in the spatial order of the production of Black Watch. First performed at the Hampstead Theatre in July 2011, Loyalty presents its themes—the political manoeuvrings leading Britain into war and the eventual refutation of evidence for WMD in Iraq—“without offering anything new,” reviewers criticise (Murphy). Apart from “snippets of juicy insider gossip” (Szalwinska), Loyalty principally provides “new emotional data” in the clash of the domestic and the political, Susanna Clapp writes (“A Woman”). And Lyn Gardner notes: “it is in the bedroom or the kitchen, as it charts the inner workings of a marriage under immense strain because of outside forces, that the play feels most true” (“Loyalty”). The play thus turns on domestic life. Conflict arises at home as Laura opposes a war which manifests in the very private sphere of the bedroom. Political adviser Nick brings his work home: Conference calls with Blair and Bush are taken, and boxes holding confidential governmental papers on Iraq pile up. The domestic setting, laden with symbols of turmoil and alarm (G. Brown, “31.7.11”), reflects the political situation: In the run-up to war, the order of home is disturbed by “signs of building work going on” (15), and its atmosphere is upset by a “cacophony of bleeps and special ringtones and ordinary telephone purrings and burglar-alarm yowls and sirens and doorbells” (Clapp, “A Woman”). This home—and, by extension, the homeland—is in a disregarded state of alarm: The principal characters “ignore … the alarms going off ” (37). When the news announces that no evidence of WMD is found in Iraq and politicians begin to reinterpret their former claims for war, the (re)decorators arrive at the door of Laura’s home: “Who told them to start this early?” she asks (62). Despite the invasion of war into the private sphere, which temporarily sets the children at risk as protesters gather outside the house, “there’s no irreparable damage done,” Georgina Brown notes (“31.7.11”), except for the “broken … window in the new conservatory” (111). If war challenges domestic peace in act 1 and prompts Laura to step out of her home and into the epicentre of Downing Street in act 2, she is not actually forced to take action: NICK. I wonder if you’d really have done it though—walked out and told the press. If Tom hadn’t got there first.

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LAURA. Of course. I was all ready. And you’d have come with me wouldn’t you? You’d have backed me up. You couldn’t have stuck with him? Could you? Surely? Not after that. LAURA moves away from NICK a little and looks hard at him, as if she’s not quite sure. (112) Ultimately, she does not need to leak the information herself. War, it seems, just has her wondering about loyalty without any devastating personal consequences. Thus, while the play’s home/front appears as messy as Laura’s household, Loyalty is reluctant to register a lasting damage on the home.

The Broken Promise of Home in Mike Bartlett’s Artefacts More permanent is the damage done in Mike Bartlett’s play Artefacts (2008), which Christopher Hart describes as another “bold attempt to represent Britain and Iraq … as a domestic drama” (“2.3.08” 218). But Sierz also assures that the play is “a critical snapshot of the disaster of the Iraq War” (Rewriting 82), explicitly calling up the historical context of post-invasion Iraq. At the same time, Artefacts relies on the figurative to tie its small-scale family story to the British intervention in Iraq more generally. Again, the use of symbolic imagery characterises this domestic play on war. In fact, theatre critics largely agree that Bartlett’s use of symbolism is anything but subtle (e.g., Zinoman; De Jongh, “26.6.08”; Allfree, “27.2.08”). In the play, Iraq comes to the attention of sixteen-year-old Kelly as she meets her father for the first time. Ibrahim is from Baghdad and curator of its National Museum. In London for a lecture, he takes the opportunity to trust his daughter with an ancient Mesopotamian vase lest it should be looted in a country still far from peace. His improbable decision “exposes the notion that [Iraq] is returning to normality as the self-serving propaganda of the withdrawing invaders” (P. Taylor, “Artefacts”). When the new-found parent refuses to extend his brief visit, Kelly smashes the pot into three pieces, symbolising the rifts running through the play: the shattered families in London and Baghdad, Iraq itself as an inwardly torn political ‘artefact’ assembled historically from “these three kingdoms” (23), and “the wrecked state of relations between … an imperialist Britain and a ruined Iraq” (De Jongh, “26.6.08”). The play draws on the idea of Iraq as an ancient culture and an embattled territory throughout history (Marlowe). Kelly is the British antithesis to this, a “consumer-driven” adolescent (Billington, “Artefacts”) with “no idea of the important things in life” (Letts, “First”). The thematic synthesis of British youth and Iraq War (P. Fisher, “Artefacts”) links the play to Days of Significance, though in the case of Artefacts the connection is symbolic rather than specific. On a later visit to Baghdad, Kelly returns the vase patched together with superglue, a hint at the play’s “none-too-subtle premise” that Britain’s intervention in Iraq was clumsy and naive (Logan). “Kelly’s unwelcome interven-

5. Stage Plays

tion,” Sam Marlowe confirms, “is a clear parallel to the British involvement in Iraq.” The title gives away the play’s concern with the shaping power of (human) interference and, at the same time, reveals the constructedness of “our more profound values” (Shuttleworth, “Artefacts”). Despite the contrast between the two cultural spheres, the play also demonstrates their interconnectedness (Marlowe), not least in its central characters. Ibrahim is the traveller between Britain and Iraq and father to two families; and Kelly is of half-English, half-Iraqi origin (Sierz, Rewriting 82). She wonders about her “little pot belly”: “Maybe this is the point they mix. The two countries. Where my genes got confused. This belly is not Iraqi or English. It’s Engraqi. Iringlish” (9). Her British identity is socially conditioned whereas the unexplored paternal connection points beyond home to something unfamiliar. While the play is one of the few by a British author to introduce more prominently an Iraqi character, critics find that Ibrahim is “far more a symbol than flesh and blood” (P. Fisher, “Artefacts”). When his other daughter Raya is kidnapped in chaotic post-invasion Iraq, he prioritises his faith in the future of his country and culture and refuses to sell off the vase to pay a ransom that would play into the hands of the rogue system. For Clare Allfree, the “attitude of Kelly’s father is a perversely undeveloped symbol of the seemingly deadlocked nature of Iraq’s sectarian war” (“27.2.08”). Then again, Kelly also firmly “remain[s] a cipher for the West’s imperial egotism” (Logan). The setting of the final scene, London’s British Museum, becomes a potent locale signifying the identity-establishing ‘conservation’ of British history. As Kelly shows the museum to her Iraqi half-sister Raya, the scene again emphasises the cultural difference between the hedonistic Westerner and the tragically principled Iraqi. It is Raya who points out that the broken artefact has been added to the exhibition: The symbol for Britain’s short-sighted decision to go to war sits on display in the homeland—and is ignored. Kelly interjects: “We did what we thought was right.… I am not sorry” (61-62). She refers to her own ambivalent role in urging Ibrahim to sell the pot for Raya’s liberation, but her words also implicate Britain’s ‘meddling’ in Iraq at large. She intends to deny her Iraqi roots and return to ‘normality’: “Shopping and eating and coffee and out and home” (66). Thus, she replicates her homeland’s loss of interest in Iraq—just as the vase is banished to a place where “everyone is a tourist” (65). If in her insistence the play does not already introduce a moment of doubt, then it at least suggests Britain’s accountability and the idea that a return to life as before should not be possible. Such civilian or domestic perspectives provide figurative variations of the home/front in drama on contemporary war. Most recent drama negotiating the impact of war on the British home, however, revolves around returning soldiers. To demonstrate how deep the idea of an invasion of war into the home sphere can be inscribed into a dramatic representation of contemporary war, the following chapter will focus on an example that is concerned with such a paradigmatic traveller between Britain and battlefield—Simon Stephens’s Motortown.

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5.2.

Close-Up: Home/Fronts in Simon Stephens’s Motortown

Motortown (2006), a ‘homecoming drama’ (Goetsch 135) set in the context of the Iraq War, is the “breakthrough play” (Innes 452) of Simon Stephens, who is seen as one “of the most prolific and powerful new voices to emerge in [the 2000s]” (Middeke, Schnierer, and Sierz, Introduction xiv). Motortown not only exemplifies the focus on the returnee in drama on contemporary war, the play also prominently presents the interplay of war and home to form a British home/front in the sense of the present project. In his synopsis of the play, Christopher Innes apprehends this interconnectedness of the spheres: “Motortown … deals with the reaction of a returned soldier … to the society for which he fought, with its disrespect for all that he represents, and complete lack of moral standards: an absence that unites ‘homeland’ with war zone” (452). The play indeed creates a continuity between war and home. In Motortown, which was first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs in London in April 2006, soldier Danny recently returned from service in Iraq. Back home, he is troubled by a profound sense of alienation that grows over the course of the play and culminates in the murder of a young girl. Though Danny shows signs of trauma (Goetsch 136), Nicholas de Jongh criticises that “Stephens … scarcely suggest what inspires the soldier to torture and kill when back home” (“Another”). Danny’s “dangerous tendencies” predate his military career, which “arguably weakens the case [the play] makes about the brutalising effects of violence committed under the cover of the Army,” Paul Taylor writes (“Motortown”). For Aleks Sierz, “the anti-war argument of the play is at best compromised and at worst negated by the fact that … Danny has always been a bit of a psycho” (“Tribune”). Reviewers seem to expect that the play should present war’s effect on the soldier from a psychological perspective (e.g., Nathan; C. Spencer, “Horror”), but few find a coherent argument for such a reading. Only Alistair Macaulay suggests that the play gradually “takes us down into [Danny’s] psyche.” De Jongh objects: “Motortown lacks the spirit of psychological inquiry and investigation” (“Another”). But if the play does not take a psychological perspective, how can it be read in a meaningful way? Motortown may resist ultimate reconciliation of all its dissonances. But a look at the semiospheric formation of home and war and especially at the movement across the boundaries in between can offer something in reply to the ‘double bind’ observed by reviewers. Danny’s mental condition and murderous outburst are not associated exclusively with either of the spheres—just as the play’s home emerges as a home/front not disconnected from or fundamentally opposed to war. The relation between the two spheres is one of interaction and entanglement to explore the impact of contemporary war on British life.

5. Stage Plays

Space and Movement: Structures of Return The semiotic formation of home in Motortown takes place within its reduced set design. According to the playtext, the stage should be “as far as possible without décor” (4). The undefined open space allows for the interaction of semiotic spheres and supports processes of resignification. Ramin Gray, director of the play’s first run at the Royal Court Theatre, staged a “stripped-to-the-brick production” (P. Taylor, “Motortown”) showing the back wall, theatre equipment, inactive cast and stagehands during performance (Hewison; also, Sierz, “Tribune”). To sketch out places and spaces on the empty stage, Kate Bassett notes, “bleak plastic chairs [were] dragged into new configurations between scenes” (“Independent”; also, Gardner, “Soldier’s Tale”; Macaulay).22 For some, the “bare-bones staging … diminish[ed] the intensity” of the performance (Halliburton) or revealed the production’s “undeveloped approach” (Allfree, “26.4.06”). Yet, other critics highlighted how the reduced décor captured the play’s ideas: the “sense of stark dislocation” (P. Taylor, “Motortown”), for instance, or Danny’s “nihilistic mindset” (Halliburton). Further, the bare stage exposes the theatricality of the performance of Motortown, an effect that was by no means undesired. For Stephens, revealing the performance’s fictionality encourages an engaged audience and promotes figurative readings: I love spare stages. I love seeing the infrastructure and the mess and business of theatres revealed to me. I love watching actors become characters. I love then watching them become actors again. I love it because it demands from me as an audience member an engagement with the fact that what I am watching is fundamentally metaphorical. It’s made up. (Introduction xvi) Theatre, according to Stephens, is about reflection and a transfer of meaning from performance to real life, that is, in Motortown, a reality shaped by war. Reading the play as a realist case history of an individual falls short of the semantic potential of more figurative readings. Not all reviewers agree with Stephens when it comes to the desired effect of a spare stage. Charles Spencer, for instance, notes that “the silly choreographed routines,” which were the only markers for the change of location between scenes, “tiresomely remind us that we are watching actors and weaken the charged atmosphere” (“Horror”). However, at least potentially the absence or limited use of physical signifiers lays a ground for easy shifts and changes in location and context. The sparse décor in Motortown may thus promote the transferral of signification across levels and scales and between civilian, military, and war spaces. Home and war can more easily intersect and intertwine. 22

Pictures of the 2006 production are available on Flickr.com (Royal Court Theatre); other productions did not follow text directions regarding the set design as faithfully (23rd Productions).

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Starting from and ending at home, the action of Motortown, like the narrative of Graham Swift’s novel Wish You Were Here (chapter 4.2.), is circular. The first and last scenes are set at Danny’s current residence, his brother’s apartment. Following Danny through his day, the play embarks on a trip that reenacts his life’s journey from home to military service, the battlefield, and back.23 Visiting places across town, Danny is confronted with home on increasingly less familiar scales. He meets his ex-girlfriend Marley, friend Tom, and the dubious Paul, who represent home on familial, local, and national levels. After these encounters, Danny leaves the city with Paul’s underage girlfriend Jade towards the geographical margins of the homeland, a restricted military area on Foulness Island. Coupled with the eruption of violence that takes place here, the location stands in for his time at the front. On his way back to the city, he reexperiences the profound defamiliarisation of his return from Iraq to a home he no longer recognises: In a hotel bar, a heterotopic place substituting but not quite reproducing home, he has a disturbing encounter with a London couple. Eventually, he returns home to the home of his brother Lee. Structures of return are ubiquitous in the play: Motortown “is about … leaving home, coming back, and seeing with more clarity than you saw it before,” Stephens explains (qtd. in Dickson). Apart from using the trope of the returning soldier, the play is structured by return on the level of performance: Danny reenacts his return from war to the homeland when he returns home at the end of the day. Moreover, the play itself returns to its starting point and thus ‘comes back home’ on a structural level as well. Seen in the light of Lotman’s ideas, these structures of return reveal an emphasis on acts of border crossing and thus possible translations of meaning.

The Point of Departure: The Unhomely Home In Motortown, home on the lowest level is defined by the absence of the ideal, a lack of substantiating home-making practices, and the rejection of the traditional family home. This home emphasises a tension within Lotman’s model of culture: The semiosphere is delimited as “ours,” “safe,” “harmoniously organised” but is essentially heterogeneous and asymmetrical (Universe 131). From the outset, home in Motortown is provisional: The relationship of the brothers is the central signifier of this home fraught with tension. Oscillating between affection and abuse, solidarity and estrangement, the interaction of Danny and Lee conveys a disturbed, contradictory, unsafe notion of home. Lyn Gardner diagnoses, “a desperate, brutal tenderness … between the life-damaged Danny and his genetically damaged elder brother” (“Soldier’s Tale”). Brotherly affection is suggested when Danny takes up a 23

Andrew Dickson observes: “Journeys both physical and emotional are a recurring motif” in Stephens’s plays,” for instance, in Harper Regan (2007) and Pornography (2007).

5. Stage Plays

game from childhood and quizzes Lee, who shows deficits in his social and intellectual development, about metropolitan population numbers: “DANNY gives him a big smile. LEE smiles back, proud and shy” (9). But this soon turns into resentment as Danny rants: “How much deodorant have you got on? … You smell like a tart’s boudoir!” (12), and tells Lee to get his teeth fixed, “they’re fucking disgusting” (13). The brothers repeatedly break the promise of home. Acts of home-making are announced but never put into practice: Lee talks about household chores, like ironing Danny’s shirts and washing up, but rarely carries them out. He offers his brother an opulent breakfast just to serve a meagre cup of tea and dry piece of toast, “no plate” (9). He even admits that he led Danny “down the garden path” about the breakfast: “I should have got some [food] and I just didn’t” (13). In fact, depending on homedelivered lunches himself, Lee is incapable of performing home. But Danny is just as unreliable: His empty promise to take Lee to the seaside—“I’d look after you. See you all right” (13)—lingers on as a rather dark harbinger of things to come. This unhomely home is modelled against a parental home that is defined as the returnee mocks his brother: “We should get a car.… Put it in the driveway. Give it a clean. Show it off. You could wear a suit. Get a cup of tea in the morning. Go to work. With yer tie on. You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” (8). Subsequently associated with their parents, this conservative life script is treated with contempt by Danny. And Lee, too, devaluates it as out-dated. What is more, he even links their parents’ behaviour to cases of Western misconduct in Iraq: “They talk about you incessantly. It’s like a kind of water torture for visitors” (8). Their unwelcome affection stands in for and works as a comment on Blair’s prowar argument of altruism towards an oppressed Iraqi people24 —which was, by 2006, belied by cases of prisoner abuse. Early on in the play, this incidental remark overrides the semiotic boundary between home and war, highlighting how the family home is not sealed off from war. There is no angle from which this home appears ideal or intact.

Ghosts of Home and War: Traumatic Patterns A traumatic symptomatology characterises the mentally unstable Danny and interlinks his previous mental condition and the effects of war. The returnee has disturbing dreams, refuses to see his parents, and ignores Lee’s invitation to revel in “old memories” (10). Because some symptoms of psychic stress, such as a shaking hand or violent outbursts,25 predate his military career, the presentation is inconsistent with an accurate case of war-induced PTSD. But if Danny’s preexisting condition were the point of the play, the relevance of his war experience would be lost (Sierz, “Tribune”). In fact, the mental condition of the character is never coherently explicated in the course of the play. Instead, traumatic patterns and ideas inform the 24 25

See Tony Blair’s speech in the house of Commons on 18 March 2003 (“Full Text”). Elsewhere, he breaks out in tears (43) or speaks incoherently (41, 53); also, Goetsch (136).

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performance beyond the characterisation of Danny. The “intrusive” and repetitive occurrences of return in the play reflect properties of traumatic memory (Caruth 4). And on this structural level, Motortown subjects its protagonist to ‘relive’ the traumatic experience of war and the return to a defamiliarised home. A literary, rather than literal, notion of trauma also accounts for the image of the haunting ghost that further interlinks Danny’s troubled relations to home and war. When Danny is taken aback by a picture from “a true-life book about ghosts and haunted houses,” Lee notices symptoms of traumatic stress in his brother: “Your hand’s shaking” (10-11). No reason is given for the intensity of Danny’s reaction, though, save the context of the scene: The incident is preceded and followed by references to both the past family home and the military war sphere that upset Danny’s mental balance. First, Lee proposes to “do the washing up together” and recall childhood memories (10) and later reminds his brother of his military passing-out. In both cases, Danny resorts to a strategy of denial. But the temporal contiguity of his reaction to the eerie image of the ghost suggests a figurative ‘release’ of his suppressed responses to Lee’s cues. And the haunting image thus links the military and the civilian memories. The war experience in Motortown not simply aggravates, as Sierz claims (“Tribune”), a preexisting condition; it effects a more substantial change in the soldier. Initially, frontline duty is presented as “giving out chocolates” to Iraqi children (9). But this narrative—reflecting the “gap between impact and understanding” of a traumatic event (Luckhurst, The Trauma 79)—must be fragmentary because it cannot account for the transformation of Danny’s personality: “It didn’t look anything like you.… It’s like you’re a completely different person,” Lee remarks about his brother’s appearance on a television news programme (8-9). The play could also be read as drawing on the disfiguring effect of media representation at this particular point; but later, Motortown emphasises again that it is war which effects the substantial redefinition of the returnee’s identity: “We’ve not got the same hair. Or the same bone structure. Or the same eyes. Or anything. We did once. But now we don’t,” Lee says to Danny at the end of the scene (15). To Marley, too, Danny appears “odd” (24). Though they had been separated for a while, it is only in reaction to his disturbing war correspondence that she tries to break contact altogether (20). War, then, is responsible for Danny’s condition alongside, not in lieu of, previous problems. The travelling function of the figure provides a clue as to how the conflicting information on the source of his mental issues—acquired at home versus effected by war—may be reconciled: The soldier, moving between home and war zone, both highlights the border and calls it into question (Frank 223). There is, in other words, room for both sharp demarcations and continuities between home and war. The ambivalent nature of the boundary in Lotman’s relational model accounts for separation and interconnectedness of Danny’s life at home and at war.

5. Stage Plays

A Day’s Journey: From Home to Home/Front In Motortown, movement is crucial for the interaction of home and war. From Danny’s perspective, war reverses the semiotics of the spheres when he reenters the homeland: “I come back home. It’s a completely foreign country” (65). The familiar is now external, home becomes the frontline. This alienation is illustrated in the day’s journey. First, Danny meets his ex-girlfriend Marley. Their dysfunctional relationship shows his disconnection from home: “She doesn’t want to see you. She told me to tell you … that you were frightening her,” Lee informs his brother (5). Marley herself confirms Danny’s isolation when she associates him with the uninhabited space of the Marshes: “So they [the army] just leave you? … To fend for yourself? … You’re trained for that, aren’t you, Danny? You could go to the Marshes. Dig a hole” (20-21). When he, still obsessed with Marley, visits her, she is alarmed. Stressing that they separated “years ago” (20), she threatens to take legal action against him. His initial incredulity turns into threats and a rough physical reaction: “He goes to her. Grabs her arm” (19). Though there are doubts about Marley’s reactions too, brought on by her own symptoms of traumatic impairment (Goetsch 137), the social distance between Marley, an aspiring student, and the simple recruit from Dagenham rather supports the distance she claims. A later loop in the journey takes Danny back to Marley to stress his failure to build a home of his own. He asks her to start a family together, but his proposal appears as dubious as the parental life script rejected earlier: “We could get a car.… Get a couple of kids. Drive them to school. Nip off to work in yer suit. See you later, Danny! See you later, Lee! Have a good day, boys. Do all that” (40). For a brief moment, he conjures up a desperate, chimerical vision of home that is belied by the reality of their relationship. When Marley ignores him, Danny mourns the loss of his prewar home and, by implication, Marley: “Do you remember my flat? … It was good there, wasn’t it? I wish I never sold it. I’ve nowhere to go now” (40). The memory triggers traumatic symptoms in both. Again, a family home is not to be affirmed in Motortown. Next, Danny meets his old friend Tom who represents the communal home and stands in for an alternative path Danny might have taken. Their shared background manifests in a monological mode of conversation: Tom never doubts Danny’s euphemistic version of his life and military career. But that Tom readily accepts war as an ‘easy’ and ‘boring’ tour of duty (22), can be read as wilfully ignorant. Danny’s attitude clearly betrays a troubled mind: TOM. How come you’re not gonna go and see [your folks]? DANNY. ‘Cause they do my fucking head in, Tom. … TOM. Right. Right. Right. Right. Good. (23)

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Though he knows that something is wrong with Danny, Tom is unwilling to adopt a critical position and rather sees the soldier as an epitome of masculinity: “Are you as hard as fuck now?” (24). Born and raised in disadvantaged Dagenham, Tom shares Danny’s social background.26 He is one of “life’s brutal losers,” as Sierz observes (Introduction xv), a petty criminal dealing in replica arms. Yet, his innocent small talk about their youth, popular media phenomena, and recreational activities shows that, in contrast to the war-worn Danny, Tom is harmless. Just as their paths in life diverged, their initial consensus disappears: War affects Danny’s perspective on home—“It’s changed, hasn’t it? The whole town” (26)—and disrupts his sense of belonging; but to Tom, who never left his home town, Dagenham presents itself as a continuity. Reenacting the decision to go away from home and join the army, Danny then leaves Dagenham. He calls on Paul to ask him to modify the replica he bought off Tom into a gun that can fire live ammunition. The transformation of the harmless replica into a deadly weapon in this scene hints at the effect the military sphere has on the recruit. Away from home, Danny is also removed from the remnants of identity it provides. In his conversation with Paul and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Jade, he creates an alternative biography for himself and invents a wife who died a violent death, revealing his deep-set anger towards Marley. At the same time, he already anticipates Jade’s murder on Foulness Island: Danny borrows her name for the fictional deceased spouse and thus singles her out as the substitute for the autonomous, inaccessible Marley. Paul’s perspective extends home to the national and global. His reference to 9/11 and the War on Terror turns travelling into a threatening act: They don’t let you take anything onto planes anymore, Danny. Did you know that? Since 9/11. Fucking nothing. Apart from pens, oddly. They should take pens off you. That’s what I think. The pen can be a lethal instrument. You can stab somebody in the eye. Push it all the way in. Cripple them at least. Cut into the brain. Leave them brain-damaged. It’d be easy, that. I’d leave the end sticking out, wouldn’t you? (33) This tie between travelling and acts of violence foreshadows the climax of Danny’s journey. Envisioning the entanglement of home and War on Terror, Paul presents the attack on the World Trade Centre as a violent spectacle linking terror and entertainment: “The best heist film Hollywood never made” (34). But Paul, evoking images of infestation and vulnerability, also shows a deep-set distrust in the appearance of home:

26

For Aleks Sierz, Simon Stephens’s plays in general give “a comprehensive account of British working-class life”; the working-class characters, Sierz adds, may be “trapped, but all manage to rattle the bars of their cages” (Introduction xv).

5. Stage Plays

Have you the slightest idea how many tube lines run under the square mile area you can see from out of that window…? It’s completely fucking hollow down there. Beneath the surface of the ground. It’s full of vermin and metal. Rats. Mice. Squirrels. Foxes. (34) To conceive of the transformation of home under the impact of war, the British tradition of fox hunting is translated onto the superordinate sphere of the homeland. The code of the hunt, including the auditory signification of “a hunting trumpet” (35), blends into an apocalyptic image of home: “God. Law. Money. The left. The right. The church. The state. All of them lie in tatters. Wouldn’t you be frightened?” (35). From his dystopian vision of British life, Paul then returns to the nucleus of home and links the remnants of family to the sphere of war: “The family unit seems like an act of belligerence” (35). Any attempt at building a family is included in his scenario of necessary failure: “All long-term relationships are doomed or ironic” (35). Of course, these observations are embedded in the discourse of a suspicious character. Paul professes morally questionable opinions, is self-interested and criminal, and passes sweeping judgement on various minorities. Still, he introduces central issues debated in the UK at the time: binge drinking,27 the poor, popular media, and others. What puts into perspective his crude statements is his interjection that “when you can’t tell the difference any more between what is real and what is fantasy. That’s frightening” (33). This also applies to Danny’s frame of mind. Though it will be the ex-soldier who conducts the single most violent act in the play, Paul already includes the audience in a global sphere of complicity: “This whole planet is in a terrible state…. The ecological fallout of the decisions that you have made … today, you, not anybody else, you—the ecological fallout of those decisions is catastrophic” (38-39). The murder of Jade may be the consequence of an individual decision, but it is bound up in a much larger cultural set-up.

Access and Excess: Performing War at Home When, on his second visit, Danny threatens to kill Marley, her friends, and family, he targets the home sphere, but his course of action is determined by his military training for war: “This is what I’m trained to do” (42). Despite this threat to the home community, the ensuing violent climax of the play is displaced to the military zone on Foulness Island. Danny’s promise to take his brother to the seaside and Tom’s suggestion of a day trip to the island both suggested recreation, and Danny takes Jade to Foulness on these terms. However, the name of the place alone connotes a corruptness that the cultural core would always negate and expel. Here, the warworn soldier executes what he cannot do at home. He turns this alternative site into a battlefield to translate the war system into the homeland. Foulness works

27

See Jane Milling et al. for the cultural phenomenon of “[d]etermined drunkenness” (30).

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as a border zone between home and war: Cut off from the British mainland, the island signifies a semiotic periphery. Codes of war are employed throughout the scene. On entering the island, Danny assumes the authority of his former military persona: “See his face, on the checkpoint, when I showed him my pass. That was a bit of a surprise for him, I think.… Uptight cunt. Officer class. Failed” (44). At home, his attempts to present himself as self-assured had failed: “Did you see me on the telly, by the way? … I was fucking brilliant,” he had boasted to Marley, who disagreed: “That’s not what I heard” (41). She holds her ground. With the inexperienced Jade, however, Danny has the upper hand, and he redirects his aggression to her. She becomes the manageable surrogate to Marley. On the island, Jade even comes to resemble Marley in her fear of Danny: “Are you gonna hurt me?” (44). When Danny begins to disclose devastating details of his military and war experiences, they almost immediately translate into the physical abuse of Jade. On her, he acts out the mistreatment of army recruits and prisoners he witnessed in Iraq. As Danny proceeds from mere harassment to a malicious and ultimately deadly power play, the scene retraces the scale of abuse spreading from home into the war sphere in Motortown: from the verbal abuse of Lee and the rude treatment of Marley to the bullying and abusive authority in the army and acts of torture in Iraq. Only on Foulness Island, away from home, Danny talks openly about the cruelty within the military system at home and in the field: And you can’t tell anybody. You can’t pull rank. You can’t do that. Get a bucket of shit and piss from the slops of the drains there. Get some little geek cunt. Pour it over their head. It was quite funny. And out there. Everybody says about the British. How fucking noble we are. I used to like the Yanks. At least they were honest about it. At least they had a sense of humour. Yer get me? (51) The soldier points to the macabre scorn of the famous pictures showing USAmerican soldiers humiliating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. This reference is even made explicit in the playtext: “[Danny] imitates the famous Lynndie England ‘Thumbs up!’ sign” (51). The British returnee underscores this with another iconic ‘gesture’ linked to the exertion of cruelty in recent wars: He documents the torture of Jade on his mobile phone. The traumatic impact of Iraq is emphasised when Danny talks about the mutilated bodies he saw. He begins to hallucinate, superimposing his memories of war onto the reality of Foulness Island: “Take you’re [sic] burka off, this is a body search,” he orders Jade (51). Again, the inescapability of the traumatic image forges a link between war and home: “Course you come back. Go up London. Fucking burkas all over the place” (52). Danny’s frenzy also targets home when, over Jade’s dead body, he rants against society and its pharisaic attitude towards war. His torrent of hatred, which replicates Paul’s abusive language, is directed against minorities like “Hasidic Jews,” “lesbian cripples,” and—hinting at the 2005 London bombings—

5. Stage Plays

“Paki boys … smuggling explosives in rucksacks onto the top decks of buses” (53). Nor does the returnee exempt those representative of a conservative home ideal: Fucking leave university and get a fucking house together and spend all day in their shitehawk little jobs hoping that one day they’re gonna make it as a fucking big shot.… They’re shrivelled up home counties kids and they march against the war and think they’re being radical. (53) For Danny, the heterogeneous community signifies all that is wrong at home. There is a traumatic aporia in his function as soldier to defend a home—by venturing forth against an external threat—that is already compromised: “It’s not funny, Jade.… I fought a war for this lot” (53). At the end of this discriminatory speech, the play reminds its audience of Danny’s traumatic suffering as he, not an innocent victim either, wraps up Jade’s dead body: “Have I got a stammer?” he asks (53). Moreover, the blunt shooting of Jade and the “massive trail of blood” exuding from her dead body (53) create an experience for the audience that references the violence and intensity of Danny’s war experience. Though reviewers are generally ungracious towards the choreographies between the scenes—deeming them dispensable (Gardner, “Soldier’s Tale”), disruptive (C. Spencer, “Horror”), or inconclusive (G. Brown, “30.4.06”)—, they admit that “the synchronised mopping up of Jade’s blood was deeply moving,” as John Nathan puts it. And Susannah Clapp also notes its affective potential: “It doesn’t meld, but it packs a punch” (“Quick”). Motortown, bringing war ‘home’ to the stage, thus offers in the here and now of the performance a substitute for the violent experience of war.

Homecoming: A Sense of Defamiliarisation On his way back towards his home in the penultimate scene, Danny stops at a hotel bar. Within this heterotopic space of deviance,28 the play explores his sense of alienation upon his return from war. But the defamiliarising effect of war lies not just in an opposition of battlefield and peaceful homeland. What unsettles Danny is his changed perspective that reveals the conflicting nature of home itself. At a Southend hotel, he meets Justin and Helen, a middle-class couple from an expensive London neighbourhood with good jobs and two kids. “For a day out. A night off. A night out” (55), they occasionally spend a night away from their family home to live out fantasies conflicting with the appearance of their conservative life script: Rather casually, Justin invites Danny to their room to sleep with his wife. In essence,

28

One of Michel Foucault’s examples of a recreational heterotopia is the American motel, a place “where illicit sex is totally protected and totally concealed at one and the same time” (335).

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however, their life at the centre does not differ from the dynamics of the peripheral getaway space. When Helen describes Justin’s relationship to their daughter Pip back at home, it does not contradict but in fact resemble her own relationship with her husband that determines their secret fantasies: “He’s absolutely under her thumb. She’s got him twisted round her little finger” (62). Given Danny’s murderous act in the previous scene, the fact that he is “a bit fucking freaked out” (62) by the proposal attests to his disorientation and displacement. But Danny’s utter loss of moral inhibition does not exculpate the couple. Still, what is problematised is not their promiscuity but their self-centred, wilful ignorance: Danny’s war experience elicits no more than a brief phrase of pity from Helen. She is only interested in Danny’s physical appeal, the masculine body of the soldier: “Do you work out?” (58). In Danny’s however belated reaction, her perspective appears as deliberately ignorant of the wider implications of his fitness: “‘Do you work out?’ What the fuck are you talking about? Two hours drill and forty lengths. Twenty-five minutes max. Alternate strokes. Breaststroke, front crawl, back-stroke, butterfly” (65). It marks him as a trained combatant of war. For Danny, the more serious aberration of Helen and Justin is that they attended the 2003 antiwar march. This discovery, not their sexual offer, triggers his expression of alienation: “I come back home. It’s a completely foreign country” (65). He returns to a home sphere that opposes and externalises the war it sent him to fight. While domains remain neatly cut off from the perspective of Helen and Justin, boundaries dissolve and experiences—here and there, then and now—become interlinked for the soldier travelling between home and war. Though Danny professes to be “open-minded” (63) about the couple’s offer, he sarcastically associates it with experiences in the male-only military space that are similarly at odds with his ambivalent yearning for a conservative home: “In our platoon. You could go, sometimes, into downtown Basra.… Or not even bother. You could just stay in the barracks. Fuck each other. That would happen” (64). Danny breaks out into a verbal fit that subverts the borders between the spheres. Fantasising about turning his weapon against British antiwar protesters, he introduces the ‘language’ of war into the home sphere (he had already acted on the code of violence in the earlier murder). His rant also reveals traumatising scenes he witnessed in the military: the brutal, sexually connoted abuse of “a younger lad” (65). This torture scene takes place not at war but in the military school and thus, strictly speaking, within the semiosphere. A continuum of abuse emerges, stretching across borders to include the atrocities of the war sphere: “Mind you, you play the game out there [in Iraq] and it’s even funnier. ‘Cause they don’t like anything with the slightest sexual connotation. You two [Helen and Justin] out there! Fucking hell!” (65). Similarly, Danny draws a line from the sexual voyeurism of Justin—“do you like to watch, do you?” (63)—to a desire to look at the violent pictures of Westerners beheaded in Iraq: “You wanna

5. Stage Plays

watch, Justin?” (65). For the returnee from battlefield and murder scene, home is turned into a space of deviance akin to war, an alienated home/front. Danny’s recollections from Iraq haunt him. Beheadings, mutilated children, the abuse of a fellow soldier are no longer confined to the war zone: “It could happen here, all that. I reckon it will” (66). His bewilderment culminates in an image recalling Paul’s dystopian vision of the homeland: “Wait until the water runs out. And the oxygen runs out” (66). In his distraught search for orientation, he fuses the other with Western popular culture: “I’m gonna convert to Islam. Save me from scumballs like you two.… See me. I’m as innocent as a baby. I’m a fucking hero! I’m a fucking action hero” (66)—as Michel Foucault writes, heterotopias have “the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other” (334). Or, in Lotman’s terminology, the semiotic borders are maximally permeable in this scene, and in his disorientation Danny freely travels across boundaries.

The Family: Community as Complicity While the play had introduced the semiospheric centre of the family as disrupted, in the final scene it explores the possibility of a reunification of home. But instead of reaffirming a discarded home ideal, the play reconceptualises home as a space of complicity. From the end of the previous scene, Danny’s declaration of innocence still echoes: “I am as innocent as a baby” (66). But bringing the dead body of Jade back home in the boot of his car, he returns to Lee’s apartment a murderer. The contradiction brings into focus the question of accountability. Lee quickly assures Danny that their parents are willing to give him an alibi. They do not know about the torture and murder, but their ignorance is deliberate: “They won’t ask why they’ve got to lie for you,” Lee adds (67). It enables them to keep up a positive image of their son—but it also makes them his accomplices. Brother Lee, on the other hand, is aware of Danny’s crime. Though he shows signs of distress, stutters, and is even lost for words at times, Lee is also thrilled by what happened: He examines Danny’s weapon “with a mix of complete horror and absolute fascination” (68). And as before, Lee’s declarations and actions do not correspond. He claims that he will call the police and turn Danny in but proves too weak to follow his alleged moral sensibility. When Danny returns home, all family members effectively back him—either through wilful ignorance or deliberate inaction. Thus, the family emerges as a space of complicity to the violence enacted by the returned soldier. The family is not apprehended as an affirmative ideal; instead, the familial community reappears as the ‘act of belligerence’ that the suspicious character of Paul had proclaimed earlier. Upon his return to the family home, Danny continues the pattern of sexually connoted abuse that is present across the entire play. When the brotherly bond

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seems to be too weak to protect him from prosecution, he ensures Lee’s complicity through the shared guilt of an incestuous transgression: He kisses LEE, on the lips. DANNY. There. You don’t need to tell anybody. Do you? Have you got a hard on? You have, haven’t you? It’s all right. It’s all right, Lee. Straight up. It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. All our years. All of them. My brother! (72) Referring to his trained chest and body odour, he utilises his body and thus falls back on both Helen’s earlier eroticisation of the soldier’s body and the homosexual connotations of the cases of abuse in both the military and the war zone. By extension, the pattern of complicity is transferred onto the wider home/front, suggesting the accountability of the cultural community in the context of war. And indeed, Stephens confirms in an interview with Patricia Benecke that ‘we,’ as part of Western consumer culture, are equally to blame for the war in Iraq (44).

The Home/Front in Motortown In Motortown, war manifests in the experience of the ex-soldier. The euphemistic representation as a peaceful ‘handing out of chocolate’ and heroic encounter is, from the beginning, called into question. Rather than concentrating on an opponent on the battlefield, the play is concerned with the cross-connections between the state of home and warfare. It gradually reveals not a peaceful home opposing the violence of war but a continuity of abuse culminating in torture and homicide. Danny’s unsettling past prepares him to embrace the sphere of war: “I don’t blame the war. The war was all right. I miss it” (74). With the “idiot’s guide to the Geneva Convention” war provides a clear boundary for exerting violence for the unstable Danny who claims that he did not take part in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners (74). At home, open violence is restricted and relegated to unthreatening contexts like the Hollywood blockbuster but, according to Paul’s dystopian vision, thrives below the surface. This is why, upon his return, Danny has lost his sense of belonging and the home is turned into an embattled home/front. The play does not stop at the soldier’s entanglement with war. It calls into question the positions of anyone living in a country at war. Motortown reveals a “scepticism about the possibility of moral certainty on either or any side,” Suman Gupta writes (100). The family becomes Danny’s direct accomplice, but there are moments of doubt about the other characters as well. The play is suspicious not only of criminal and racist Paul but also of middle-class Helen and Justin. They lack reflective engagement with war and only attended the antiwar protests for, in Stephens’s

5. Stage Plays

words, ‘easy absolution.’29 All claim to be innocent or ignorant—if not in so many words as the most obvious offender Danny: DANNY. In Basra, when it all kicked off with the prisoners, I didn’t do any of it. I never touched nobody. … LEE. I never touched anybody. DANNY. You what? LEE. It’s I never touched anybody. Not I never touched nobody. That’s just careless. (74) Lee, though he is also cast as a victim of Danny’s abuse, unwittingly joins in his brother’s ineffective claim of innocence. If ostensibly Lee corrects Danny’s faulty grammar, he effectively repeats his brother’s doubtful declaration. Everyone is caught up in the chaotic vision of home at war. Motortown explores home not as a self-contained space of security and comfort that would be able to defer all acts of war to an external space or the relatively contained sub-semiospheric military realm. Instead, home is explored as an inherently embattled sphere where patterns of abuse take their course to continue into the realm of war, culminating in scenes of torture. The figure transgressing the border into the war sphere—the soldier—carries on and again brings back home the excess of violence. Alienated, he confronts home with what is essentially an unacknowledged continuity. In the face of an irruption of war into the home sphere, home is turned into a space of complicity that calls to account all its inhabitants.

5.3.

Findings: Performing the Home/Front

Plays on contemporary conflict conceive of war as a crisis recoiling upon and reshaping the cultural home sphere. They turn into an experience what the audience would have perceived primarily through media representation. Performed on stage, dramatic narratives translate the abstract or mediated image of war into a theatrical firsthand experience through the copresence of actors and audiences in the spatial reality of the theatre. There might be references to more distanced media representations in some plays: In Loyalty and Black Watch, audiovisual media take on a complementary role; Fallujah, a dramatic response to the perceived

29

In an interview, Simon Stephens talked about his uneasiness with or reservations against an unreflective antiwar attitude: “Ich hatte massive Vorbehalte gegenüber dem Irakkrieg…, aber ich konnte nicht verstehen, warum mir dieser Friedensmarsch so suspekt war. Ich glaube, das hatte mit meinem Eindruck zu tun, dass die Antikriegsaktivisten nur auf der Suche nach schneller Absolution waren…. Wir sind Teil dieses Kriegs” (Benecke 44).

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lack of information on the city’s siege during the Iraq War, and How Many Miles to Basra?, which was adapted from a radio play, deal more substantially with media representations of war. But principally, plays on contemporary war rely on the spatial and figurative dimensions of the stage to create a performative presence of war. The plays, for instance, use onstage and offstage space to signify inclusion and exclusion (Glory Dazed), fuse the home and the war zone on stage (Belongings, Loyalty), and self-reflexively accentuate theatricality through set design (Motortown). Some of the plays, such as Days of Significance, Fallujah, and Stovepipe, were delivered as promenade productions creating an immersive experience by breaking down the spatial distance between the audience and the onstage action. Similarly, for an affective engagement of the viewers, Black Watch cast ticket holders as fictional spectators of a military drill show, the Edinburgh Tattoo, and placed the seating close to the energetic stage action. The Pull of Negative Gravity rather created immediacy on a sensory level. To immerse the audience in the performance, the play used the “deafening” (3) soundscape of the helicopters that carry home injured soldiers. Another theatrical reality was used to bring to life the subject matter of war: the presence of the actor’s bodies. The film Kajaki (2014) offers a “demoralizing and nerve-wracking” (Rapold 63), drawn-out and graphic mangling of the bodies of a group of soldiers trapped in a forgotten Russian minefield in Afghanistan (chapter 6.1.1.). And yet, the agony of the war-impaired Dai “grunting and stuttering in pain” as he begs his bride for intimacy in The Pull of Negative Gravity (Roca) is less gory; but it is certainly as excruciatingly painful to watch the actor as he crawls over the stage in front of the audience. Reviewer Octavio Roca writes that it was “a grotesque sort of cruelty.” The subjection of the soldier’s body to the tides of time in Black Watch, presenting Cammy as ‘cannon fodder’ as he narrates the regiment’s history, as well as the choreographed fighting and the slow-motion explosion killing three of Cammy’s mates also effectively expose the soldier’s body on stage. Directly affective is also the exposition of the real injured body. In the performance of The Two Worlds of Charlie F., a play that informs with anatomical precision about the lacerating effects of weapons and explosives on the soldier’s body, the audience is forced to witness not the enactment but the actual presence of the injured body in the theatrical space of performance. Though mitigated by the actors’ humorous comments on their disabilities, the exhibition of the actual body traumatised by brute force must, and did, create affective momentum. While this form of presentation casts the soldiers primarily as casualties or survivors of war, other plays show them as perpetrators who threaten or exact brutal violence as well. As reviewers of Motortown noted, the irruption of violence on stage, in particular the drawn-out mopping up of the trail of blood, was effectively unsettling. Similarly, when one of the soldiers in Black Watch physically attacks the Writer, who stands in for a home

5. Stage Plays

community removed from the reality of war, the scene coerces the audience into the position of firsthand witnesses of the brutality brought on by war. The emphasis on an affective address of the audience also underlines the fact that the plays rarely present ready-made answers to the issues and problematics of wars whose justification and purpose, disputed from the beginning, seemed to dissipate with time. Rather, they raise questions, sound out more generally the interactions and entanglements of home and war, and employ strategies of representation that underscore a sense of urgency and, according to the title of Roy Williams’s drama, ‘significance’ of the events for Britain—including the audience present at the performance. The plays provide occasion to reflect on how ‘we’ as an audience are part of these wars—openly, for instance, in the pressure put on Hannah to take sides in Days of Significance and point-blank in the concluding audience address in The Two Worlds of Charlie F. Less open appeals appear in the sphere of complicity suggested in Motortown, the involvement of the audience in Black Watch, and in the idea of inclusion and exclusion in Glory Dazed. The plays take different starting points to explore the cultural sphere of Britain at war. Between them, they cover a spectrum of urban, rural, agricultural, workingclass, educated, and middle-class homes: from the intimate family homes of Artefacts, Belongings, and The Pull of Negative Gravity to the communal homes of Days of Significance and Glory Dazed and the national community addressed in Black Watch. These homes are linked across the scale: In Loyalty, the private meets the political; and Motortown describes a journey across the strata of home. Some plays introduce specific sociocultural subspheres, such as Days of Significance, whose realist presentation of working-class youth was acknowledged in reviews and research, or The Pull of Negative Gravity with its story of rural decline. Others emphasise symbolic renderings of home, such as Glory Dazed, which starts off to the insistent knocking of the returning soldier to be let into the pub, that is, the community back at home. Regardless of these differences, plays on war largely conceive of home as neither ideal nor intact—even before the incursion of war. Home is marked by absences, broken relationships and families, economic hardship, limited prospects, and other deviations from the ideal. In spite of this, war is still presented as an invasion of the stage from outside, like the soldier bursting into the pub of Glory Dazed “agitated and sweaty” in a bloody shirt (ps. 116). War often also takes the form of an impressive soundscape: For example, in Days of Significance combat action is signified by the sound of explosions; The Two Worlds of Charlie F. rings in the advent of war with a blackout and the sound of an IED going off; similarly, “extreme darkness and extreme noise” mark the outbreak of combat in A Canopy of Stars (245). The opening spectacle of the Tattoo in Black Watch ended with a cannon shot followed by the anticlimactic silent entrance of the soldier in plain clothes. When in The Two Worlds of Charlie F. the soldier steps out from behind the screen for the first time, his entrance is equally restrained, but

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the sight of the actor’s missing leg is as drastic as any acoustic spectacle. Correspondingly, the sight of the soldier returning disabled in The Pull of Negative Gravity stops the music and festive spirit at his welcome party. Comparatively unobtrusive are the red boxes of government papers in the bedroom in Loyalty, but the telephone ringing and alarms going off signify insistently the invasion of war into the family home. In Motortown the outburst of violence is protracted: “Just four dull thuds” mark the killing of Jade and only the sight of “the massive trail of blood” signifies the outrageousness of this eruption of violence (53). The play exploits the moment between seeing and apprehending what happens on stage and, figuratively speaking, at war. One of the most impressive images of war entering the home sphere in Black Watch—a play that presents the invasion of war and the blending of the spheres in various scenes—is the moment when war cuts its way slowly through the surface of the pool table, drawing out the moment of intrusion in a similar way, silent but forceful. In these plays, then, the appearance of war creates a dissonance in the interplay of dramatic modes and representative levels—between the audible and the visual, between explosion and silence, between the portentousness of what is shown and the restraint of presentation. As war comes into contact with the challenged semiospheres presented in the plays, it renders visible the rifts and deficiencies of home: In The Pull of Negative Gravity, for instance, war puts an end to the fantasies of continuity of the farm home which some of the characters entertain; in Days of Significance, the characters’ different positions towards war highlight the dissociation of social strata of the home sphere; in Belongings, war reveals the gendered disunity of home; and in Artefacts, it brings to light the longstanding absence of a father. Nevertheless, subsequently and often even concurrently, the plays also reveal continuities and resemblances between war and home that present home as a home/front because it incorporates or even already possesses properties and principles in general associated with the extrasemiotic sphere of war. There is, for example, the continuity of abuse embracing both home and war in Motortown; in The Two Worlds of Charlie F., the ‘drill’ of rehab reenacts the military training and underscores the presentation of life after war as joining the ‘regiment of the wounded’; in Days of Significance, the inner conflict of war as a matter of conscience is extraverted in the verbal battles of the final act; and in The Pull of Negative Gravity, a continued existence of the soldier in the home sphere after war is rendered impossible—just as the father had ended his own life because of the domestic agricultural crisis that threatened the family’s subsistence. While the plays often deal with the palpable consequences of war by addressing the combatant’s mental and physical injuries as well as his—and, occasionally, her—struggle to readjust to home, they also develop distinct symbols and imagery to conceive of the complex nexus that is war. What is particularly conspicuous is the imagery of the game. Considering that this metaphor is rarely used in either

5. Stage Plays

novel or film, there might be a self-reflexive reference to the stage plays’ own ludic, make-believe quality, which in a sense rivals the serious reality of the subject matter of war. The unwinnable games played in The Pull of Negative Gravity resurface in the drinking game proposed and deliberately lost by the soldier in Glory Dazed; and in Black Watch, the repurposed pool table is a potent symbol for the game of war. The image of the game signifies the loss of control in the confrontation with the reality of war (and, though only occasionally, reassurance). To capture the subjective experience of the soldiers on the ground in The Two Worlds of Charlie F., fighting at the front is described as “playing Afghan roulette” (45). But when the major presents the role of the British in the current conflict as a “player” in the “Great Game” of Afghan wars (29), the play’s imagery at the same time obscures the responsibility of foreign-policy-makers for the reality of fighting and suffering abroad and reaffirms Britain as a global political power. In Black Watch, the connotations of the image are again more painful as war literally cuts open the surface of the pool table at home and establishes a passageway of war into the lives of the men. Another image used in plays on contemporary war is the idea of securing a building against invasion, as in Glory Dazed and Loyalty. The installation of a security system in the family home in Loyalty points to the idea of bourgeois life threatened by external forces and links the play to novels also set in middle-class London family circles, such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday (chapter 4.1.1.) or Ali Smith’s The Accidental (chapter 4.1.5.). Highly symbolic, if singular, is also the object of the broken vase in Artefacts; it signals the play’s historical and cultural concern. Exceptional is the image of the virus in Bean’s On the Side of the Angels, which conceives of British intervention—the example is a foreign aid NGO—as spreading harmful side effects along with the aid provided in crisis areas abroad. This image turns around the idea of an invasion from the war zone into the homeland present in most plays. Then again, in Bean’s playlet, the reference to war is rather circumstantial, which places it on the margins of this project’s corpus. In conclusion, the home in the examined dramatic narratives of contemporary war is prominently presumed to be ‘out of touch’ with the conflicts waged abroad—in the sense that the home sphere is ignorant of or disconnected from the British involvement in the conflicts. The servicemen who return from the war zone in the plays struggle to find their place back home. War prevents the mutual comprehension of those who stayed at home and the soldiers who experienced war on the battlefield. In Black Watch, for instance, the reactions of the returnees and especially their response to the unwitting questions of the civilian interviewer attest to the failure of home to understand war as an experiential reality. Other plays, such as Glory Dazed, convey this separation in images of exclusion that isolate the soldier from the home community. Some dramas, such as Motortown and Belongings, focus on the alienation which the soldier experiences upon his or her return. In The Pull of Negative Gravity, Artefacts, and Loyalty, this alienation manifests as an interference

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with the integrity or cohesion of the nuclear family. In theatre addressing the wars of the 2000s, the sense of defamiliarisation gives expression to the prevailing need to understand the significance and repercussions of the conflicts for British life. Even plays that defer most of their action to foreign and battlefield settings, such as The Empire or Stovepipe, refer to the home sphere in the form of social tensions and capitalist culture of the homeland in the context of recent conflict. Overall, drama on recent warfare creates theatrical home/fronts that offer a vicarious experience of war in the real place and time of the performance. In this sense, theatre makes war ‘accessible’ and provides a space to reflect questions of accountability and the role of the British home sphere in the recent wars. The stage thus calls for an acknowledgement of war and the integration of the conflicts into the experience of British life today.

6. Film and Television

In March 2009, Independent arts columnist Tom Sutcliffe expressed his astonishment that television, “the most significant storytelling medium we have,” should not react adequately to Britain’s ongoing military engagement abroad: “When it comes to fictional dramas … that might have ambitions to win a significant audience,” he noted, “Iraq is the dog that didn’t bark” (“For Good”). To Sutcliffe, this neglect of the topical theme of war “seems more than odd”: Here’s a hugely significant event—one which continues to engage British citizens in all sorts of ways (some of them fatal) and yet it barely registers on [television and] if you want to see something that reflects real British lives now you will probably need to switch off the television and head to the theatre. (“For Good”; also, Harper 207) When the mini-serial Occupation (2009) was broadcast just three months later, however, Sutcliffe readily revoked his declaration that television offered no serious drama on contemporary war (“Last”). Still, in principle, he was not all wrong: In the UK, the production of film and television drama on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars only slowly gained pace from 2009 onwards.

6.1.

Exploration: New Home/Fronts on British Screens

In more recent years, British film and television productions have been successful with stories of war on national and international screens—if they deal with wars not all too close at hand. The popular serial Downton Abbey (2010-2015), for instance, is set against the backdrop of World War I as a cultural watershed (Baena and Byker); and Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Dunkirk (2017)—though resonating with the context of “Brexit and the orgy of British chauvinism that made it possible” (Stowe)—tells a story of World War II heroism. British films on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not received the same attention as these productions. Few film narratives on recent war became as popular in Britain as Our Girl (2014-), a television series that “airdrop[s] soap stars into war zones,” as Julia Raeside puts it.

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Overall, the reception of films on the recent wars in terms of television ratings and box office takings was mixed, and production budgets were often low, especially when compared to US productions (e.g., M. Barker 4; Toffoletti and Grace 63).1 Still, there is a notable number of British films that address contemporary war. With its various channels of distribution, film is after all the most wide-reaching form of fictional storytelling among the media examined here. The films are, however, rarely recognised as a coherent body of work or genre—nor does such categorisation promise particularly productive results. Martin Barker notes that US Iraq War films have elicited an inconsistent audience reaction, and he argues against reading them as a coherent genre (112, 132). This opens up the field of British films on recent wars for other analytical approaches. To pick up on a quote in Martin Barker’s study, the films examined here are “about the country now” rather than the wars per se (112). Despite their diversity on other levels, films with a contemporary war theme use war as a prism for their examination of home. War appears as an intruder into the cultural sphere, turning home into a contemporary home/front. In terms of format, the corpus includes a varied selection of film productions—from theatrical releases to full-length television films, from television series to single episodes. The focus is laid on film narratives in which the wars are crucial to the development of the main storyline and are more than a mere occasion for the plot. A lack of reflection on the recent wars, for example, is the reason why films with an action plot, such as Hummingbird (2013) or Outlaw (2007), are not among the particularly productive examples of the present project. The corpus is instead dominated by what is commonly perceived as film and television drama. In this context, the term drama is used as a genre marker for stories of every-day crisis that explore human character and action in a realist mode (Schlichter). Drama as genre is the “amorphous category” that dominates UK film production in general (Hill and Petley 308). Drama and its “largely realist mode” also characterise US film production on the recent conflicts (Boll 5) and the war film in general (Eberwein 55-60), a genre that negotiates the “‘human experience’ and ‘grand natural human drama’” of war, as Martin Barker notes (21). The expansive and historically shifting label ascribes to film and television productions the “quality and authorial creativity” of theatre and literature, Jonathan Bignell 1

Revenues for UK films on recent warfare were low: Only Sunshine on Leith grossed over two million pounds and ran in theatres for 19 weeks; Outlaw earned just under one million and Hummingbird 230,000 pounds. Box office revenues for Route Irish, In Our Name, The Patrol, and Kajaki: The True Story were limited; other films saw a limited theatrical release, are yet unreleased, or data is unavailable (BFI “Weekend”). Also, few of the television films appear in the weekly top 30 ranking of the British Broadcasters Audience Research Board; exceptions are Occupation, ranking tenth on BBC1 in the week from 15 to 21 June, and pilot and series of Our Girl (BBC1), which were among their respective weekly top 15 (BARB).

6. Film and Television

and Stephen Lacey argue (2, 6)—once again linking the media examined in the present study. Moreover, the present chapter includes variations such as crime and docudrama. Genres less in keeping with the war theme, such as comedy and musical, are rare, whereas fantastic genres are not represented at all. Feature film and television productions share basic “semiotic affordances and technological capacities” (Smith and Pearson 5) and are therefore discussed within a single chapter here. As the narrative form of both feature films and television productions, film is a multimodal ‘liaison of the arts’; it embraces and modifies diverse practices such as literature, theatre, and music (Seel 9-10; also, Monaco 176). But film has its own ‘language,’ its own use and application of these codes. Film narratives emerge in the interplay of mise-en-scène, all that is visible within the frame of the image, and montage, the sequential arrangement of shots and scenes.2 The meaningful space created along these synchronic and diachronic axes is a basic constituent of the film narrative—and a crucial determinant of home and war spheres in the productions examined here. Film space is shaped by the way spaces and places are shot (or generated and manipulated digitally), by how perspective, range, and mobility of the camera are used, and by how the resulting material is edited (Bignell and Lacey 4-5). In literature and on the stage, large-scale physical spaces are usually displaced to the imaginary realm of language and, in the case of drama, offstage space. The range of the camera, on the other hand, allows film to visually explore vast battlefields (Boll 5), desert Afghan landscapes, or labyrinthine Iraqi cities as well as human emotion in close-up. And in the editing process, spaces of different scale (e.g., family home versus open landscape) or location (e.g., the homeland versus abroad) may be interrelated to create meaningful connections and indicate as well as transgress semiotic boundaries. Furthermore, film narratives emerge in the “juxtaposition of two information tracks”: sound and image (Allrath, Gymnich, and Surkamp 2). Production, reception, and critique may emphasise the visual, but the acoustic level is as important; it is, for instance, “essential to the creation of a locale” (Monaco 125, 213-214). Meaning is always created in the liaison of acoustic and visual signs, even in soundless scenes (Cumbow and Johnson). The diegetic soundscape of ambient noise, dialogue, and music shapes film space, characters, and events (Monaco 212-213; also, Wulff, “Diegetischer”); the nondiegetic soundtrack is habitually used to create atmosphere and comment on—that is, explain, theorise, and discuss (Monaco 212)—plot and story world (Wulff, “Diegetischer”). In fact, the use of “sublime music” as a “counterpoint” to war’s atrocities is “a staple” of the Hollywood war film (Stanley), a genre that operates as an intertext for any fiction film on war. 2

The mise-en-scène is determined by, for example, field of view, depth of focus, lighting, colouring, arrangement of objects and characters, costume (Wulff, “Mise-en-Scène”). Montage is more than the cutting of the footage; it is a creative process (Wulff, “Montage”).

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Despite the gradual dissolution of traditional distinctions (‘media convergence’) (Smith and Pearson 3), film and television have retained distinct properties. These differences are not essential but based on media use in the cultural context (Smith and Pearson 4). Filmmakers have to take into account funding guidelines, such as “a bold vision and creative excellence” (BFI, “Production”; also, BFI, Film Fund), while daytime, prime-time, and late-night television programme is subject to different practices of editorial control (Raymond Williams 93-94), such as the watershed for content considered “unsuitable for children” (Ofcom 8). There is also a difference between the temporally delimited collective event of a screening at the cinema and the “continuous flow” of television, which is typically watched at home (Raymond Williams 86).3 In addition, differences in format are relevant for the examined films because format has an impact on the narrative. Single films, series, serials, or single episodes differ, for instance, in terms of plot development and suspense patterns: The story arc of feature films is in principle initiated, developed, and closed within the single work, whereas series and serials fragment the narrative, introduce a greater number of narrative strands, and develop story lines over several episodes (Bednarek 12; also, G. Smith; Thompson 58ff.); and the storyline of single episodes depends on and works within the narrative world established in previous episodes and seasons of the respective series. The present chapter focuses on the narrative analysis of the material rather than on the quantitative evaluation of its reception. Sources and conditions that offer insight into the representation of home and war in the examined films, such as reviews and critical commentary or serial structure and genre, prevail over hard data. Still, it should be noted that conditions of production and distribution can indeed reveal something about the cultural relevance of film narratives. There is a general awareness in film and television studies for film as a cultural commodity (e.g., Adelmann et al.); and studies dealing with films about the recent wars often use data like audience figures or box-office gross to make their argument. Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace, for instance, suggest that the poor revenues of post9/11 US war films indicate a traumatic effect on audiences unable to “assimilate … the meaninglessness of the Iraq invasion and occupation” (76; also, M. Barker; Blackmore). In the context of the present chapter, it is noteworthy that many of the examined films on contemporary war entered the competitions of film festivals. The Patrol (2013) premiered at the Raindance Film Festival, for example; Ken Loach’s Route Irish (2010) played at no less than eight international festivals; and even The Mark of Cain (2007), which was produced for television, was screened at the International

3

DVD, video-on-demand, etc. challenge the binary distinction (Granados; also, Masters); but they have no great effect on the examined material or the present project.

6. Film and Television

Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The reasons for a festival release can reach from industrial networking and marketing effects to artistic ambition or political interests (De Valck 17, 203). But festivals offer a platform for films of “aesthetic achievement, cultural specificity, or social relevance” and provide a reception context that does not rely on commercial success, Marijke de Valck explains (37). The revenues of British films on recent warfare may attest to a general reluctance to engage with the theme of war—not unlike the unwillingness of US audiences described by Toffoletti and Grace. Nevertheless, British film producers seem to feel a need to tell stories of war and promote them through the festival context independent of their subsequent marketability. Though feature films are produced for the public space of festival or movie theatre, the reception of film productions in the domestic space of home has its own implications in the present context. Television and DVD as well as, more recently, mobile technology and online streaming put place and time of viewing into the hands of audiences (P. Gauthier 229). Thus, film is often associated with domestic and private viewing situations. In light of this study’s interest in the home sphere, films on the recent wars—and television productions in particular—may therefore be read as enacting the invasion of war into British homes in more than one sense: While war footage often appears on television sets within the mise-en-scène, thus invading the fictional family sphere, the films themselves are fictional representations of war that ‘invade’ the homes of real-life television viewers. Further, it will be argued that some films emphasise their intrusion into the reception space of the audience through particularly affective depictions of war and war’s atrocities. Another link of the examined films to the experiential sphere of their audiences is based on the fact that film shares its audiovisual mode with the intense television reporting on the wars. Key events, such as the bombing of Baghdad in 2003, were broadcast live and were then relentlessly recycled (Chouliaraki, “Spectacular” 133). Under the influence of digital media use, film tends to recreate, recycle, and remediate the content of other screen-based media, Patricia Pisters explains (238-239). This includes mobile and social media, which also played into the public perception of these conflicts (Peebles 9; also, Pisters 242): The war in Iraq was, for instance, “a YouTube phenomenon,” Martin Barker observes, “with a stream of soldiers’ videos [and] other circulated or leaked kinds of filming [that] created a recognisable look to the conflict” (36). Competing with conventional journalism, such forms raise questions of authenticity and authorship (M. Barker 36; Pisters 239) but also have an effect on style and content. Brian de Palma’s US film Redacted (2007), for example, is known for its “faux found footage” style but was renounced by critics and viewers for the way it dealt with the role of the Western occupiers in Iraq (M. Barker 37; also, Pisters 237-241; Greiner, Die neuen Kriege 333-359). Media and mobile technology are also present in British productions, as evidence for what happened at war in Route Irish or to provide the “found-footage” style and theme

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of the 2009 small-budget film WMD (Pulver, “WMD.”), for example. These films, however, do not necessarily problematise the role of the media in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.

State of Research In scholarship on film and television narratives on recent warfare, studies with a focus on British material are rare. Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget’s essay collection The ‘War on Terror’: Post-9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary (2015) is an exception. Janet McCabe’s and Stephen N. Lipkin’s articles branch out into the field of US productions, but The ‘War on Terror’ is primarily concerned with material from the UK as well as events preceding and following the Iraq invasion rather than the 2001 terrorist attacks, Stephen Lacey notes (33). The collection focusses on television productions, but Derek Paget acknowledges the connection to respective feature film narratives (23). More particularly, the volume is concerned with television drama and docudrama but occasionally also includes other formats, such as documentary and current affairs series (McQueen) or comedy (B. Bennett, “The Comedy”). The contributions examine some of the same productions (10 Days to War, The Mark of Cain, Occupation) and themes (e.g., trauma) as the present study or look at subgenres also relevant here. McCabe’s article on the US forensic crime series CSY: NY (2004-2013), for example, links to the discussion of “Greater Love” (2013) below, an episode of the UK series Silent Witness (1996-), which also deals with forensic investigation. But overall, The ‘War on Terror’ is “concerned with a relatively narrow area of artistic activity on the small screen,” that is, the docudramatic in television (Paget and Lacey 2). Most studies dealing with films on recent wars examine material from the United States: In the transmedial study Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq (2011), Stacey Peebles explores the soldier’s “struggle to properly decode their environment” and the need for categorisation that war creates (170, 2). Martin Barker’s US film study4 A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (2011) argues that filmmakers and critics felt the time was right “to say something about the war,” while audiences paid little attention to fictionalisations of the Iraq War experience (1, 12). Toffoletti and Grace’s article “Terminal Indifference,” published in Film-Philosophy, also deals with US films that failed at the box office to “offer a poignant commentary on the effect of the US invasion of Iraq on the American psyche and its cultural imago” (64). Referring to Jean Baudrillard’s “The Spirit of Terrorism” (2001), which comments on the symbolic and sacrificial deaths of the terrorists in the attacks of 9/11, Toffoletti and Grace read the terrorist act, both domestic and in the war zone, as inconceivable to the Western mind because it “runs 4

Martin Barker’s list of films includes two UK productions; only The Mark of Cain, however, narrates a story with a British context; Battle for Haditha (2007) focuses on US troops (4).

6. Film and Television

counter to West’s overwhelming investment in the positivity of accumulated ‘life’” (72). The “indifference” of audiences and the commercial failure of these narratives is a traumatic manifestation of war at home that cannot simply be captured in terms of PTSD, Toffoletti and Grace argue (81, 78-79). Films on the recent wars are also read in the context of the US war film genre: Robert Eberwein’s The Hollywood War Film (2010) and Douglas Kellner’s Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film in the Bush-Cheney Era (2009), for example, each include a chapter on Iraq War films. And films on the recent wars are also part of the corpora of Patricia Keeton and Peter Scheckner’s American War Cinema and Media since Vietnam (2013) and Ernest D. Giglio’s Here’s Looking at You: Hollywood, Film & Politics (2010). The German study Die neuen Kriege im Film (2012) by Rasmus Greiner uses the frame of new wars theory to read Afghanistan and Iraq War films in the context of productions on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and armed crises in Central Africa. Perhaps partly because of its early production date, The Mark of Cain (2007) is the only British film included in the corpora of both Martin Barker’s A ‘Toxic Genre’ and Tim Blackmore’s article “Eyeless in America” (2012). Among the other British film and television productions on the contemporary wars, Occupation and Route Irish have been the object of some academic research. Often, though, these investigations have an objective that overrides a detailed analysis of the individual text. Further, it must be noted that many of the examined films are of relatively recent date, such as The Northern Paradigm, which has only been released in August 2017 according to its Facebook page. Academic critique is often simply not available yet. Still, most of the productions have been reviewed by film critics—some extensively, others sparsely. As this brief overview reveals, much remains to be said about British films on contemporary war. In the following subchapters, the field will be explored to identify foci and thematic clusters. More importantly, this exploration is guided by the present study’s overall interest in the negotiation of the British home sphere and the representation of war as an invasive force. The section works out the narrative spectrum of home/fronts in British films set against the backdrop of war through focussed analyses of selected texts.

6.1.1.

War Films: At the Frontline

The representation of contemporary war in film is, more than in novels and stage plays, wedded to a specific genre: the war film. War films “have their roots in [a] specific, identifiable historical event” (Eberwein 7). While this is also true for the films examined here, they rarely fit the narrow definition of the combat film, which centres around battle situations within a historical war of the twentieth or twentyfirst century and draws on standardised situations, character constellations, and established motifs (Hißnauer 168-169). Among the films in the corpus, only The

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Patrol and Kajaki: The True Story (2014) exclusively show the action in the war zone, at the expense of—but never excluding—references to home.5 Combat action in films on contemporary war more often works in the narrative background or is embedded in a story moving between homeland and war zone. Nevertheless, the war film genre must be understood as an intertext for many of these stories. For Eberwein, war films serve “to process the experience of war,” make war accessible in representation, and turn it into a safe “spectacle” (7-9). For authentication, war films may use documentary footage or recount a real-life event as in Kajaki: The True Story. At the same time, the war film is a highly codified genre built on recurring narrative elements, such as battlefield and home front events, acts of courage, moments of farewell and homecoming as well as highly charged symbols, especially the flag (Eberwein 9-11). Moreover, Hollywood war films, Martin Barker argues, entertain “two heavily-invested, ‘balancing’ myths” first proposed by Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black: a world divided into good and evil as well as war’s regenerative, unifying effect (M. Barker 10-11). With plot patterns of departure, battle, and return (Hißnauer 172), war films often travel across boundaries of home and war—an aspect that resonates in many of the films examined here. Traditionally, war films focus on a group of male combatants diversified in terms of regional origin, ethnicity (Eberwein 12, 43), combat experience, and morale (Hißnauer 169). In terms of generic behaviour, this group displays differences, for instance, in “barracks-” and “battle-behaviour” (M. Barker 32-33); inside versus outside codes of conduct are, for example, particularly relevant in The Mark of Cain. More recently, especially in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, soldier characters tend to be represented as victim-heroes at the expense of less ambivalent profiles (Walklate, Mythen, and McGarry 153; also, McCartney 43). The victimhero is often a traumatised soldier of lower rank separated from military and political decision-makers. Martin Barker, for example, shows how the mystery plot of the US film The Valley of Elah (2007) pardons the delinquent soldier by addressing his post-traumatic syndrome (82). To create this “new kind of soldier: the herovictim,” the film excludes alternative outcomes and interpretations of the story (M. Barker 43). Trauma diagnoses also play a role in British films on recent war. Soldier Mark in The Mark of Cain, for instance, shows severe symptoms of PTSD. But he and the other soldiers are presented as villain-victims. By casting them as both perpetrator and victim, the film plays on the idea that in the war film genre the enemy is often not identifiable, and soldiers thus serve as their own antagonists (Hißnauer 173). The enemy as a ‘gap’—an idea also prominent in the context of contemporary asymmetrical warfare more generally (Münkler 3)—supports the argument of this

5

The comedy series Bluestone 42 (2013-2015) is also confined to a war setting; following a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, it turns on the contrast of camp life and deadly mission.

6. Film and Television

study that the examined films negotiate their own culture rather than the conflicts themselves or the opponents’ ideological, historical, or socioeconomic objectives. In terms of visual style, each war develops its own aesthetics based on the landscape of the war zone. Certain types of locations come to signify the atmosphere and character of the conflict. Films on the First Word War, for instance, often contrast the confinement of the trenches with the bombed-out vastness in between (Hißnauer 175). British films on war in Afghanistan and Iraq often use washed-out yellow and brown images of desertlike strips of land traversed by single roads to characterise the war zone (Luckhurst, “In War Times” 717). The invisible threat of self-made bombs (IEDs) is usually evoked in similarly dusty and desolate street scenes. The Afghan conflict is further marked by backward settlements and mountainous landscapes, as in the Silent Witness episode “Greater Love,” for example. Iraq is often specified by denser, bomb-gutted, mazelike urban structures in which sniper fire and street riots threaten British soldiers. An “emphasis on battles within civilian space, and [with] small groups of militants in cars and trucks,” which Eberwein detects in US films on the Iraq War (38), can be found in British films as well. Post-invasion Iraq in The Mark of Cain is, for instance, characterised by street scenes of civilian unrest, militant insurgency, and strained anticipation of roadside bombs. And in Occupation, Basra’s residential areas, which serve as the principal battlefield, are visually framed as a labyrinth.

Exploring Battlefields in The Patrol and Kajaki: The True Story In the past, British filmmakers have added internationally acclaimed productions, such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), to the canon of English-language war films (E. Smith). British films on contemporary war focussing on frontline experiences, however, are scarce. In The Mark of Cain and Occupation, war action is crucial, but the narratives also negotiate at length the return of the soldier to the homeland. The Patrol and Kajaki: The True Story, on the other hand, are visually confined to Afghan combat settings. Both reflect that, for quite a while, this less controversial campaign attracted little attention at home: The soldiers’ isolation in enemy country in these films echoes the peripheral position the Afghanistan War occupied in the public mind. Though as a setting home is absent in these films, they underscore the experiential distance that separates the home sphere from the country’s engagement in the war. The Patrol (2013) follows a small group of soldiers on patrol through the Afghan hinterland. To create “a disturbing dreamlike atmosphere” (Bradshaw), the film makes use of the visual scope afforded by the cinematic medium. It opens with a sequence of aerial shots showing the convoy on its way through barren territory, “an environment that seethes with latent hostility” (E. Smith). These images are interspersed with close-ups and constricted eye-level shots from inside the vehicles.

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An ominous nondiegetic soundtrack carries the sequence, which presents the unit as isolated and an easy target in the vast surroundings and anticipates the soldiers’ overall lack of insight and control. From the soldiers’ perspective, the open desertlike scenery is bare of landmarks, making for a disorienting, nonsemiotic space in which the enemy is invisible or unidentifiable: Machine gun fire, aimed at vague spots in the depth of the mise-en-scène, is lost in the distance. The few Afghans that appear are mute, half-hidden, far-away. And to the men on the ground, their own position in war is no less obscure. At night, they witness an airborne offensive of Western troops against the Taliban over the “alien,” “unsettling” horizon (E. Smith). The patrol has neither been informed about the mission, nor can they interpret it conclusively. And yet, they bear the consequences. Retaliatory activity in the area prolongs their mission indefinitely. The anyway insufficiently equipped patrol becomes life-threatening and—oscillating between “wearing tedium” and “harrowing” outbursts of violence—“soul-destroying” (Kermode). Morale deteriorates rapidly. Kajaki: The True Story (2014), also known as Kilo Two Bravo, tells the “gruesome” real-life tale (Pulver, “Kajaki”) of a unit of British paratroopers on patrol who, in 2006, walked into an unrecorded minefield in the “badlands of Afghanistan” (Rapold 63). Though the mines date back to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, the story is set during the more recent campaign and builds on and condenses the invisible but ever-present threat of the post-invasion insurgency context. For much of its running time, the action is confined to the setting of a narrow wadi (dry riverbed), which is especially claustrophobic after the breathtaking panoramic view of the British outpost. After the first explosion in the wadi, the soldiers remain in terrified stasis lest they should step on another mutilating mine. As help from the base is delayed, the situation becomes “excruciatingly tense” (Robey), “a maddening one-sided battle with no enemy in sight” (Rapold 63). The badly injured soldiers lie in agony in plain sight, and any desperate attempt of their comrades to get to them leads to further explosions and further casualties. As a metonymic presentation of the futility of the campaign in Afghanistan, a country never defeated for long, Kajaki is “perversely effective,” Nicolas Rapold claims (63). And indeed, the film presents the war in Afghanistan as an excruciating spectacle. In The Patrol and Kajaki, the British homeland is visually absent, which puts the emphasis on the soldiers as delegates of the home sphere. Following war film conventions, the unit in The Patrol is comprised of representatives of British regions (Welshman Taff), ethnic roots (Black-British Smudge), and social backgrounds (the educated Lieutenant); the group both recreates British society in a nutshell and casts a disgruntled look back at the distant home sphere. The diversified in-group is set apart from higher ranks by a display of comradeship and a concern with traditional images of masculinity (Hißnauer 169-170). Yet, their bond is not untroubled: Though inclusive, it is dismissive, hierarchical, abrasive. The higher-ranking Lieutenant is visually isolated and in behaviour, looks, and clothing more ‘feminine’ than

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the others. His restraint and pink shirt stick out against the lower ranks’ coarser manner and camouflage blending into the background. The gap between decisionmakers at home and soldiers in the field is epitomised in their complaints about inadequate equipment, an issue also mentioned in the television film Reg (2016). Again, the Lieutenant does not openly join into the discontent directed at the home sphere. The visual absence of the homeland in The Patrol is set against a reference to the home sphere on the audio level: An interview with the Captain on what went wrong on patrol is audible in the beginning and resumed at various points during the film. This voice-over creates a narrative frame that anticipates the soldiers’ return and home’s response to their eventual insubordination. In relation to the interview, the actual patrol is set in the past, as if to explain to home audiences the men’s experience of war. For the men in the field, home oscillates between two poles: On the one hand, the family home is a place of desire, free from the anxieties and violence of war. News that the Lieutenant’s wife gave birth to a daughter, a reminder of lifeaffirming home, is the turning point from discontent to insubordination. Class differences had divided the group so far, but now the men unite across ranks and disobey the Captain’s orders to continue the prolonged and ill-fated mission. On the other hand, home is the target of their anger about the insufficient equipment provided for those who risk their lives. Moral support is equally insufficient to keep up their motivation to fight. The final scene of return, essentially a repetition of the opening sequence, emphasises the futility of the patrol. The men are victims of a home/front entangled in an inscrutable and pointless conflict. In Kajaki, the home/front emerges on an entirely different level: in the affective address of its viewers, which links this film to stage plays on the recent wars. Other than The Patrol, Kajaki does not hold the home sphere accountable but explores the performance of the British soldier as victim-hero. The men’s sacrifice is their physical suffering: “For Queen. For country. For your mates” (DVD cover). Even when help from the base sets them further at risk, the film does not blame home or military leadership—their delayed insight rather enables the story of solidarity and comradeship of the soldiers in the field. The achievements and honours of the real-life servicemen, listed in the closing credits, further endorse their hero status. The film may not bring the war home on the story level. Still, a gateway for war to enter the British home sphere opens up in Kajaki in the affective presentation of the violent deconstruction of the soldiers’ bodies. The unbearable sixty minutes of desperation and exposed mutilated bodies in the wadi (of only one hundred minutes running time) create, for the audience, an invasion of agony into their safe viewing space which the character-oriented narrative of The Patrol, inspiring empathy rather than affect, cannot achieve to the same degree.

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6.1.2.

Docudrama: Records of War

Kajaki: The True Story illustrates that fact-based forms of war representation, particularly prominent in theatre (Edgar 112) (chapter 5.1.3.), are also relevant in films on contemporary war (B. Bennett, “Framing” 210). In view of the extensive news coverage of the recent wars, this use of the factual within film drama comes as no surprise.6 After all, fact and fiction are never neatly separated in the flow of television, which “oscillate[s] in the real time of broadcast between poles of fact and fiction, evidence and belief,” Paget writes (13). By definition, docudrama negotiates real-life events using the imaginative potential of fiction, especially in cases where information is “hidden by spin or silence” (Lawson). Though frequently charged with the manipulation and distortion of facts (Bignell 197), docudrama may rather be seen as overcoming the limits of the factual while achieving a “rhetorical force” beyond that of the fiction film, Bruce Bennet argues (“Framing” 222). A number of television productions on the recent wars make a reference to factual sources, only some of which take the form of docudrama. The Government Inspector (2005) and 10 Days to War (2008), both docudramatic fictions, address the runup to or early days of the Iraq War. At the time, the results of the Hutton Inquiry on the death of weapons expert David Kelly and the government’s flawed case for war marred public trust in the government and the media, James Stanyer notes; there was a need to process events beyond collecting facts and assessing legal liability (420, 433). As early as November 2003, the stage submitted Richard Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry. In March 2005, television presented its own perspective on the case: Peter Kosminsky’s The Government Inspector was the “first high-profile” production dramatising events from the Iraq War context (Jennings 32). The film aims at “the personal background, dilemmas and attitudes” of weapons expert Kelly but does not exhaust the “possibilities of ‘docudrama,’” Tom Jennings criticises (32). For Mark Lawson, it is simply “the wrong story for this format” because the film presents the Kelly affair as “a tragedy of embellishment” by the hands of the media—only to make the same mistake itself. Rupert Smith, on the other hand, claims that The Government Inspector did nothing less than transform “the dross of reality into the gold of art.”

Public Affairs and Private Matters in 10 Days to War A broader view on issues and events of the prewar and early phase of the Iraq invasion is presented in 10 Days to War, a series of eight short film docudramas. The dramatisations of the “dilemmas of [real-life] people faced with impending war” commemorated the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion in March 2008 (S. 6

In “Docudramatizing the Real,” Jonathan Bignell also notes that structural changes in the industry led to a proliferation of docudrama in Britain since the 1990s.

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Barker 15). The series is a striking example for how the factual and the fictional can become intertwined in films on the recent wars. The episodes were commissioned by and scheduled as openers for the current affairs programme Newsnight, which afterwards discussed them with experts and politicians—including those portrayed in the episode (e.g., BBC, “A Simple”; BBC, “Failure”; also, Lacey 36). If television in general may be read as an invasion into the homes of audiences, the credentials and authority of the Newsnight programme, which proposed ways to reflect on the issues presented, emphasised this incursion in the case of 10 Days to War. According to Lacey, the docudramatic format creates a distinct sense of proximity: 10 Days to War dramatises events by adding scenes and supporting roles to “align the spectator with the characters” and cast him or her as an “intimate … observer” (36). To further audience engagement (Lacey 36-37) and to add a “sense of gravity” to the stories of ordinary people presented in the series, the producers chose “classical actors” like Juliet Stevenson (S. Barker 15); and both publicity and critique referred to Kenneth Branagh’s earlier appearances as Shakespeare’s Henry V, a figure associated with “the shaping of British national identity in terms of military conquest” (Shaughnessy 42), to call attention to Branagh’s performance of Colonel Tim Collins’s eve-of-battle speech in the episode “Our Business is North” (S. Barker 19; also, Banks-Smith; Roxborough). In fact, Simon Barker notes that “the power of Shakespearean association” has been used repeatedly to sanction aspects and episodes of the recent military campaigns (22, 18). In the first episode of 10 Days to War, “A Simple Private Matter,” original footage from the prewar context is reused in a dramatic narrative interlinking the factual and the fictional to bring about a multiplication of meaning. The episode uses clips from “The Prime Minster—The Final Countdown” (2003), an ITV1 debate in which Blair defended his case for war against women from across the country (BFI, “The Prime”). The clips are weaved into the story of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, legal adviser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who resigned shortly before the Iraq invasion in 2003. The reused footage, running on television screens in her office and elsewhere within the mise-en-scène, retains its character as broadcasted material; in full-screen display, the images also keep the harsher quality of the talk show format. The changed context, however, lends new layers of meaning to the material: When the series was aired in 2008, Blair’s key arguments for war had already been publicly challenged or disproved and images of the PM defending the invasion were associated with allegations of suggestibility, intransigence, and dishonesty.7 What is more, in “A Simple Private Matter” the television debate not only functions as

7

The 2016 Chilcot Report held Blair personally responsible for flaws in the decision-making process to invade Iraq (chapter 2.1.); but the PM’s role in the Iraq War had been criticised long before (Holland 28-29, 57-60). Stella Bruzzi looks at the construction of the “complex, layered and composite persona ‘Tony Blair’” in media dramatisations in more detail (139).

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mediated content. Fictional shots place Wilmshurst backstage at the recording of the show and present her as a privileged witness with a ‘behind the scenes’ insight into politics and administration. The ‘simple private matter’ of her quiet resignation becomes entangled with the public opposition to war embodied by the women challenging Blair in the debate. The episode thus overrides the separation of private and public British spheres of life: To take a position on war may be a question of the individual conscience—though one that is anything but simple or private. A “bigger picture” of the run-up to the Iraq War emerges (Lacey 37) as the episodes of 10 Days to War explore the legitimacy of Britain’s military engagement in Iraq from various angles: the struggle for a second UN resolution, the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the parliamentary vote for war, postinvasion politics and reconstruction, the problem of the radicalisation of British Muslims, and the ethical dimensions of invading a foreign country. As the protagonists mostly work in subordinate positions in politics, administration, or the military, 10 Days to War deals with the challenge of war in the lives of ordinary people (S. Barker 15) who are yet more directly involved in the war than the average citizen. Repeatedly, the professional expertise of the protagonist is at once demanded and frustrated: For example, Wilmshurst’s legal objections go unheard by a government bent on war. Her loss of authority, indicating the government’s disregard for international law, is visualised powerfully when, in the final shots, her figure fades out while television images of Blair continue uninterrupted. She is joined by other professionals ignored for political reasons: In “These Things Are Always Chaos,” military logistics expert Tim Cross tries in vain to raise support to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Iraq; in “$100 Coffee,” negotiations for the political future of Iraq are cancelled prematurely; and in “You Are Welcome Here,” the UN weapons inspectors’ search for WMD is also aborted. Emphatically, war confounds the professional lives of these people. Moreover, war affects the British family home in the series: Cross’s desperate anticipation of a humanitarian disaster in “These Things Are Always Chaos” is interspersed with phone messages to his wife further and further delaying his return home for the day. After an exhausting chase through London, calling on officials to draw attention to the inadequate reconstruction plans, he is stranded at Victoria Station—his train home is cancelled. The grand drama of war denies his return; his wife and private home, constantly anticipated but never seen or heard, remain absent. War also drives a wedge between the protagonist and his family in “Failure Is Not an Option.” On the day of the parliamentary vote for war, New Labour MP Paul Stinchcombe is under pressure at two fronts: His party urges him to vote with Blair while at home his strong-willed teenage daughter confronts him for allegedly siding with “his warmonger friends.” She ignores her father’s attempts to uphold their domestic routine and turns home into a home/front by challenging her parent to take a stand on war. At night, Stinchcombe returns home deeply troubled

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and unable to admit to his antiwar daughter that he voted for war. The family tie is disrupted and communication impossible. In the face of war, the relationship—at least for the moment—comes to a standstill.

Running against Blair in Reg Both The Government Inspector and 10 Days to War are among the first film dramas responding to the Iraq War, but the topic of ‘Blair’s war’ interfering in real British lives seems to be still of interest in 2016: Reg, a docudrama written by Jimmy McGovern, picks up on events that took place between 2003 and 2005. The television film tells the story of Reginald Keys, whose son died in Iraq in 2003. While his wife suffers silently and eventually overdoses, Keys decides to run against Tony Blair in the General Election of 2005. Keys’s incentive to campaign is the chance to meet the man in power for an answer to the question why his son had to die in an unjustified war “based on a pretext” (Courtney). In the film, the father’s repeated failure to get through to Blair attains a level of desperation thrown into sharp relief by the eerie nonpresence of Blair. The figure of the Prime Minister is only ever visible in original television news footage edited into the dramatised story of Reg. This reused material is framed in a way that underlines Blair’s “unavailability … except on television screens” (Rees) and his nonresponsiveness to Keys and those concerned about the legitimacy of the invasion. In line with this, Keys decides to campaign after watching a televised parliamentary debate which completely ignores the war: “Talk about ‘Don’t mention the war,’” he tells the election coordinator. “The answer is yes. I’ll do it.” In Reg, the private home of the protagonist’s family is vulnerable to the deadly impact of war. However, borders within the homeland—that is, between the bereaved father and the public figure of Blair—seem impermeable. In the film, the politician never leaves the safe sphere of the news footage nor takes responsibility for his ill-fated decision to go to war. Instead, the private man must step out into the public sphere. In the fleeting moment of public acknowledgement, that is, in the speech Keys gives after being defeated in the election, he is granted a brief moment to challenge Blair personally. Keys asks the PM to “say sorry to the families of the bereaved.” But the unmoved face of Blair, projected onto the large video screen behind the speaker, confirms the politician’s inaccessibility for and detachment from ordinary British life. In Reg, the war leaves home a deeply divided home/front.

Alternative Hypotheses in WMD and The Trial of Tony Blair One step further removed from docudrama are films with a docufiction approach, which play with the illusion of nonfiction programme. An example is the thriller WMD (2009), a low-budget production constructed around original prewar intel-

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ligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction publicly accessible at the time of production (Holroyd). In fact, the film claims to be essentially authentic: “wmd. is a fictional story based on real facts,” the closing titles state. Visually, WMD is shot in a “‘found-footage” style (Pulver, “WMD.”), using the documentary look of surveillance and hidden-camera recordings. The narrative, however, is fictional, including the opening statement that “a collection of surveillance tapes, CCTV and hidden camera footage was sent to us anonymously.” According to James Gracey, this “intrusive and creepy camera work” imbues WMD with “an ever-mounting sense of urgency.” In the film, MI6 desk officer Alex Morgan finds evidence for wilful negligence in dealing with intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the invasion. Investigating in pan-European secret service circles (with some meddling from the Americans), he visits various public locations, domestic and abroad, to meet his contacts. With great care, the film identifies Rome, Berlin, and London through recognisable buildings and public places in the background of the hidden-camera recordings to suggests the far-reaching import of the investigations and emphasise the film’s claims of authenticity, fictional and actual. Morgan’s home, which he shares with his wife, young daughter, and family dog, is also under surveillance. This intrusion of the private home is visually limited to the low, narrow angles of hidden cameras in kitchen and living room that expand the spirit of mistrust of the undercover investigation plot onto the private home (Doyle). The family home in WMD is further invaded by various news broadcasts of war and a heap of secret documents arriving on the fax machine in the kitchen. The repeated ringing, announcing the transmission of documents, puts house and protagonist in a state of alarm and transforms the private home into a sort of operations centre or ‘war room.’ Any sense of domestic security is marred by Morgan’s mounting anxiety, his increasing emotional distance from his wife, and the vague insinuations that, at any time, someone might be entering the family home via the open back door, especially in the scenes set at night. The television dramedy The Trial of Tony Blair (2007) takes yet another approach to fuse the factual and the fictional. The film presents a “hypothetical drama” built around the persona of the Prime Minister and explores in a satirical format the possibility to call to account the man who lead Britain into war (Bruzzi 125). The film’s speculative “simulation” proved to be “replete with uncomfortable echoes of reality,” Stella Bruzzi writes (136). And James Rampton agrees that The Trial of Tony Blair “posits an all too plausible future.” The film tells the story of Blair’s—at the time hypothetical—withdrawal from office. The self-complacent PM hopes that after his resignation his American friends will offer him a prestigious position. Instead, he is quickly abandoned by companions on both sides of the Atlantic over the decision of the International Criminal Court in The Hague to put him to trial for crimes of war. Though The Trial of Tony Blair introduces a person in power, it happily degrades

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Blair to a private existence, trivial and petty. To give him a taste of how his decision for war affects ordinary life, the narrative sends Blair to his personal home/front. Deprived of the privileges of his office, he comes to be haunted by his decision for war. Leaving 10 Downing Street, Tony and Cherie move into a house absurdly located around the corner of London’s “Little Beirut”—certainly “not a great place to live when your husband is hated by 250 million Arabs,” Cherie notes. The Blairs’ unfortunate new residence is also cheerfully beleaguered by a particularly tenacious antiwar protester (Bruzzi 136). Under such conditions, Blair quickly loses his grip on what he wants to see established as his legacy: He anxiously begs for reassurance that he will be remembered for “doing the right thing and standing up to evil,” but the film leaves little doubt that his legacy will be the ill-fated war in Iraq and the pending war crimes trial. By pitting contemporary history against wishful fantasy, Bruzzi argues, the film “opens up … multiple imaginative possibilities for disavowing fact in favour of these fantasies of being brought to justice” (138; also, Rentoul). The Trial of Tony Blair, Rampton adds, “taps into the deep vein of public dissatisfaction with the war” and provides a playing field for anti-Blair sentiments fuelled by the absence of evidence for WMD in Iraq.

6.1.3.

Domestic Film Drama: At the Home Front

Most of the fact-based films on the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq place their ordinary protagonists at least close to spheres of influence: the stage of politics in 10 Days to War and Reg, for instance, or secret service circles in WMD. The majority of British film and television narratives on contemporary war, however, are fictional dramas telling stories of ordinary people decidedly removed from the sphere of political decision-making. While most of the examined productions focus on military protagonists, usually the (returning) soldier, this subchapter will start by looking at examples of civilian and home-based characters in film narratives on contemporary warfare. Jimmy McGovern, writer of Reg, is the creator of three anthology series that include episodes dealing with the repercussions of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on British lives. The loosely connected episodes of the drama series The Street (20062009), Moving On (2010-2016), and Accused (2010-2012) tell contemporary stories in domestic settings. Here, stories of crisis brought on by war stand side by side with other stories of domestic change. Therefore, the episodes on war already stand in a home context through the very framework of the series. In The Street and Accused, the relevant episodes focus on soldiers returning home from war; but the episode “Tour of Duty” (2011) from the series Moving On tells the story a young mother with postnatal depression, whose husband Tom is on tour in Afghanistan. Caroline, effectively a single parent, is overwhelmed by the daily routine of household chores, caring for her child, and fear for her husband’s life. While he is torn between the

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role he ought to fulfil at home and his professional duties, his predicament impacts severely on his wife back in Britain. Her house is in a state of chaos—a sign for the suspension of the family in the absence of husband and father. Something is amiss in this constellation of Britain fighting “on the other side of the world,” as Tom puts it, no matter how “vital” this role is. As a result, the family home has become vulnerable to a literal invasion from outside: an infestation with rats. When Caroline befriends the exterminator, the integrity of the family is further set at risk. The episode ends, however, on a more positive note when Tom returns home for a fresh start. A number of similar stories from the home front are interweaved in the television drama series Homefront (2012). Expectably, it focusses on female protagonists whose husbands, fathers, or sons are deployed to the battlefield. War is of a lurking and yet unreal presence for these women. They live in the tension between their ongoing everyday routine and the state of exception created by the constant fear for their loved ones at the front. Early on in the first episode, this fear manifests when army officials are spotted in the military community—a certain sign in this neighbourhood that news of death are delivered to one of the families. Reviewers observe that Homefront, though it poses interesting questions, is at times on the brink of soap opera melodrama (Preece; also, Venning; Mohan). John Crace senses a “breathless quality” in the series’ dramatic array of “death, pregnancy, clubbing and copping-off.” Nevertheless, Homefront exemplifies how the reality of war in the British cultural sphere may place a specific constraint on fictional narratives of war: the need to make allowance for the sensibilities of those who are affected by war in real life. The online review of the regional Daily Post, for instance, remarks in a sentimental tone how “the series r[ings] true” and is “accurate and sensitive”; and the article repeatedly quotes actors’ feelings of responsibility towards real-life army wives and relatives (North Wales Daily Post).

Hidden Truths in Verity’s Summer A daughter’s perspective is adopted in the film Verity’s Summer (2013). Narrated as a “coming of age tale” (Baldock), the story explores “how the distant actions of one person [i.e., the use or tolerance of torture at war] can have far-reaching repercussions” on the family at home (Titmarsh). In the beginning of the film, Verity is returning home from boarding school for a last summer before leaving for college. Though outwardly the parental home seems intact, something unspoken stands between her mother and father, a policeman and veteran of the Iraq War. The film, exploring the family dynamics over the course of one summer, addresses a variety of issues “from war crimes and post-combat trauma to the mistreatment of immigrants and domestic dysfunction” (Parkinson, “Verity’s”). Cinematographically, Verity’s Summer works by way of suggestion rather than articulation, turning on

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images and hints rather than dialogue and explication. The opening scene of Verity’s return is, for instance, crosscut with the arrival of another traveller in her small coastal home town. One of “the many strength” of the film, Luke Ryan Baldock suggests, may be that it leaves its audience to bear the indeterminacy of such crosscutting because this unreadability “ties in beautifully with the characters themselves” and opens up a space for interpretation and reflexion. In the juxtaposition of Verity and the traveller, the film evokes war’s presence in the home sphere. After a “forced march” home (her parents fail to pick her up), Verity arrives at the empty house. As she wanders aimlessly around the family home, it reveals subtle cracks in its well-off middle-class facade: The house is vulnerable to invasion (the front door is wide open), not as spotless as it seems (the sink is full of dirty dishes), and culturally dominated by the United States (as Verity zaps through the television channels, American capitalist and cultural hegemony are suggested8 ). War is also responsible for the absence of her father: The sequence is intercut with a scene at the local pub where Verity’s father meets the traveller, with whom he served in Iraq. The young veteran is unhinged by the unspeakable things that happened at war and fails to reconnect to life at home: “Been all around the world, seen all the fucking dusty corners, I hardly know my own.” He leads an isolated life, wandering about the coastal landscape and camping in a seaside ruin. He thus resides in an unhomely home reminiscent of the makeshift camps of the war zone. Eventually, towards the middle of the film, he takes his own life. His death contrasts sharply with Verity’s life, which is just about to begin. The teenager tests her limits, has a brief affair, quarrels with her parents as one would expect (Baldock), and makes plans for her future. But her experiences over the summer are unmistakably linked to the buried truth of what happened at war. After her first sexual encounter, which signifies her initiation into the ‘knowing’ adult world, she also comes to know her father’s war-related secret: As military police, he tolerated cases of torture in Iraq and received a medal “for knowing when not to ask questions.” One might find fault with the composition of Verity’s Summer, the first fulllength production of writer-director Ben Crowe. But Jo-Ann Titmarsh’s observation that the film’s war reference is of no relevance for the disintegration of the parent’s relationship is doubtful. In fact, it may be precisely the point that the “hostility and distance” (Titmarsh) between Verity’s parents are no different from those between couples with no link to the wrongdoings of the British at war: War is not negotiated as an exceptional event here but as a reality within the family home. The father’s tour of duty is omnipresent at this home/front—from the overtones of the parent’s

8

One television show notes that the United States depends on oil to “keep the wheels turning in America”—a possible reference to its dubious interest in regime change in Iraq.

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private conversations to the radio reports on prisoner abuse by UK troops. The relevance of the war theme for the marital relationship and, by extension, the country at large is confirmed by the fact that the war-experienced husband is not the only one who is culpable. Towards the end, the film makes clear that his wife has made herself an accessory through wilful ignorance; she never asked her spouse what had really happened in Iraq. And her position in this war-affected home stands in for the involvement of the wider home sphere in the war abroad.

6.1.4.

Soldier Films: Traumatic Returns

The majority of British films on contemporary war focuses on military characters. In these narratives, war is presented as a traumatic moment or caesura in the life of the British soldier. Not all of these films explore in detail the experience of combat, the more general condition of war, or the specific features of the recent conflicts. The musical Sunshine on Leith (2013), for example, begins with the return of two soldiers from Afghanistan; but overall, the storyline of the returnees’ war experience is underexplored. According to genre expectations, Sunshine on Leith is “designed to propel the cast to break out in song” (Archibald, “Why”). Based on the popular hits of the Scottish band The Proclaimers, Sunshine on Leith disregards the story of war in favour of storylines more in tune with the lyrics: the young men’s life and relationships back at home. Referring to the 2007 stage version, Mark Fisher notes that Sunshine on Leith is “emotionally upfront and concerned with the everyday stuff of ageing, adultery and falling in love” and has “the strengths and weaknesses of soap opera.” In fact, war rather provides an occasion for the unravelling of the plot and is not explored in any detail. At the box office, however, Sunshine on Leith was successful, especially in Scotland (Brocklehurst; Black and Brown). The film thus at least attests to the presence of war in contemporary British culture—even if it offers little critical scrutiny. Returning soldiers are present in British film productions from highly marketable television to artistically ambitious independent films. The popular Sherlock Holmes adaptation Sherlock (2010-), for instance, picks up on Dr Watson’s literary origins as a veteran of the Second Anglo-Afghan war in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). In Sherlock, the doctor’s recent tour of duty in Afghanistan qualifies him to assist the detective on the ‘urban battlefield’ of London. The situation comedy Gary Tank Commander (2009-2012) also tells a story of return from Iraq (season 1) and Afghanistan (season 2). At the other end of the spectrum, Richard Jobson’s The Somnambulists (2011) “imaginatively blur[s] the boundaries between documentary and drama” (BFI, “55th BFI”). The film, based on interviews with real-life soldiers, presents “semitheatrical” soliloquies of fifteen soldiers bearing testimony to their war experience (Didock). Their dimly lit faces dissolve into the dark background, a style inspired by a photographic exhibition of

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death masks by Joanna Kane (Kemp). The “ghostly” monologues are combined with dreamlike black-and-white sequences of “the lives that might have been and the people they left behind” (British Council). The Somnambulists creates “harrowing reports from the home and foreign fronts” (McEntee). The Street and Accused present more conventional drama on soldiers returning from contemporary battlefields. In episode 3 from the third season of The Street (2009), a soldier returns from Afghanistan with his face disfigured by a bomb. Despite his scars, war more rigorously impacts on his life through the haunting memories of the incident and his traumatised personality. “Frankie’s Story” (2010), an episode of the anthology series Accused, opens with the protagonist’s appearance at court for a murder charge and then tells in retrospect what lead to his trial: Frankie and his mate Peter join the army to avoid a minor criminal charge. The experience of combat, the loss of comrades, and bullying in their unit leave Peter deeply troubled. When he commits suicide, his friend Frankie takes deadly revenge on the soldier he holds accountable and is then charged for the murder. Military service, intended to discipline, and the traumatic experience of war lead to the devastation of young British life. Promptly criticised by military officials for its portrayal of the army (Harper 220),9 “Frankie’s Story” was defended by the BBC claiming that it rather deals with general “moral issues like loyalty, guilt and not being able to kill” (J. Robinson).

Justice and Trauma in The Mark of Cain For his television film The Mark of Cain (2007), screenwriter Tony Marchant expected “criticism from both sides,” the army and its critics. The production, award-winning (BAFTA, “2008”) but not particularly successful in terms of viewer numbers (Flett), is among the earliest fiction films on the recent wars in Britain. Tim Blackmore notes that The Mark of Cain is “driven by specific historical events covered by news sources” (308): cases of prisoner abuse by British troops that came to light because of photographic evidence brought back from war (BBC, “Profiles”)—the “British Abu Ghraib,” as Marchant puts it (qtd. in BFI, “The Mark”). The film is based on statements of real-life soldiers on “what it is like to serve in Iraq” (Marchant) and dramatises “the personal costs and psychological consequences” for those involved in torture in the war zone (Bodde 142). Along these lines, The Mark of Cain explores the impact of the experience of war on British life and British homes. Like “Frankie’s Story,” The Mark of Cain begins with the arraignment of soldier Shane at a British military court. Proceeding from this opening scene, the film tells

9

A more favourable if sentimental image of military belonging is presented in the short film Straggler of ’45 (2011); it culminates in a stilted appeal to honour British veterans. In this modern-day adaptation of an Arthur Conan Doyle story, a decorated World War II veteran and a sergeant home from Afghanistan bond over their frontline experience.

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in retrospect how the young man came to stand trial for charges of torture in Iraq. To “understand why [soldiers involved in abuse] did what they did” (Marchant), the narrative focusses on the interplay of home and war spheres and explores the intermediary role of the military, the mental effects of frontline duty, and the reaction of the British home sphere, both public and private. The first half of the film establishes the sphere of war: Set in Basra, it follows the young recruits, Shane and his friend Mark, on their first tour of duty in Iraq. In the second half, the two soldiers return to Britain. Here, their participation in the torture of Iraqi prisoners soon comes to light when Shane shows pictures of the abuse to his girlfriend. The Mark of Cain not only examines the soldiers’ dilemma between loyalty to their regiment and “moral courage” (Marchant) but also raises questions of guilt and justice, responsibility and punishment that implicate a much wider circle than those who are brought to trial. Thus, the film investigates the responses of the soldiers, their families, military superiors, and the public to reveal a home/front that is deeply divided on various levels. The opening sequence introduces the impact war has on the lives of the two protagonists: Shane, brought to trial, faces the legal consequences of his actions. Mark, on the other hand, suffers a psychological trauma that is conveyed via a specific visual style combining abrupt cuts, blurred light effects, and overexposed extreme close-ups to suggest his subjective, unhinged perception. Furthermore, the opening sequence establishes the frontline forming at home against the two protagonists: Speaking out in public, military and political leaders—again, original footage of Tony Blair is used—hold Shane and Mark solely responsible for the “appalling and revolting episode” of torture, ironically concluding that “the guilty have been punished, and a line can now be drawn.” From the start, the film claims that the state of conflict is not contained within the boundaries of the war zone but extends onto the homeland. Cutting to Basra, the film suggests that the fundamental aporia of the military campaign is the clash of British ideals and Iraqi realities. Following conventions of the war film, the common soldier in The Mark of Cain is caught between political interests and frontline reality, between career-obsessed officers and unworldly idealism (Hißnauer 170). At the outset, Major Godber gives an address that openly references the eve-of-battle speech of Colonel Tim Collins (Charteris-Black 34). On a more general level, the Major’s appeal to “leave [Iraq] a better place for us having been here” echoes Blair’s belief in moral interventionism (Cawkwell 150). However, what Godber postulates in the camp is, for Mark and Shane, soon rendered moot by the reality of going out on patrol. Camp life is sun-baked, wearisome boredom, but beyond the bounds of their base they move in a highly unstable post-invasion environment of irritable Iraqi mobs and the constant fear of roadside IEDs. In the streets of Basra, British notions of justice are suspended and the Major’s highflown idealism is, down the hierarchy, exchanged for Corporal Gant’s cynical prac-

6. Film and Television

tice of ‘peacekeeping’: When a furious crowd of Iraqi civilians demands the death of a Kuwaiti whom they caught stealing petrol, Gant seeks to appease the mob by sending his men, one by one, to beat up the culprit in one of their vans. Back in the camp, Shane, confiding in his friend Mark, questions Gant’s decision and, by implication, the British course of action in the theatre of war more generally: “That weren’t soldering, was it? … It’s just being a nasty piece of work.” For Shane, the British mission in Iraq is compromised by the discrepancy between moral intent and reality. In The Mark of Cain, a disparity between ideal and practice is presented as a more general symptom of the hierarchic order of the military: After Godber is brutally killed in an ambush, Commanding Officer Major Gilchrist gives instructions to search the houses of possible assailants. As his order is passed down the chain of command, it evolves into a call for aggressive retaliation. Gilchrist’s rather calm request to “search and detain rigorously” is turned into Captain Worriss’s demand to “search and detain vigorously”; and whereas Gilchrist declares that “justice is coming their [i.e., the insurgents’] way and some of it is gonna be tough,” Worriss abbreviates this to: “Justice is gonna be rough.” Even further down the ranks, the order effectively emerges as a revenge campaign as Corporal Gant presses his men: “You find the fuckers who murdered Godber and Glynn.” The miscommunication between regimental grades—or, in Lotman’s terms, (mis)translation across the boundaries within the military sphere—reproduces the distance between lower and commanding ranks established in the war film genre (Hißnauer 170). In The Mark of Cain, the military works as a transitional space between home and war. As a subsphere of home, the army is pervaded by duplicity and conflict. Recruiting from and acting for the British homeland, it is part of the cultural sphere but, from a civilian perspective, it is peripheral. Removed from the cultural core and working on its own codes, the military is linked to the externalised state of war. It is characterised by a strict hierarchy that puts loyalty over moral conduct in a general sense. Promising belonging and camaraderie, the army should be a safe ersatz-home for the young recruits. But the abuse of those in less powerful positions is symptomatic of the military10 : Lance Corporal Quealey speaks of loyalty but bullies Mark cruelly; Corporal Gant may interfere half-heartedly but in the same breath agrees with Quealey’s mocking remarks. As soon as the torture affair becomes public, the officers close ranks and readily offer up Shane and Mark,

10

In War Hero (2007), a soldier is even killed off by his superiors. The short film switches between war scenes in which he is tortured and questioned by an Iraqi, the UK hospital where he is treated later, and his delirious ‘Arabian Nights’ phantasies of an Iraqi woman. At his bedside, overshadowed by an obtrusive Union Jack, his superiors decide to get rid of him lest he should leak information to the press. Yet, neither the exotism of the dream nor the blatant implication of the homeland at large are sufficiently motivated in War Hero.

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claiming to act on behalf of the regiment. In fact, the torture sequence, revealed more fully in the end, presents Gant as particularly brutal and self-absorbed, while Shane and Mark appear physically much less harmful (Bodde 163).11 Still, the film does not clear the two young soldiers of all charges either: They themselves bully those below them in the hierarchy, nor are they inculpable in the case of the torture (M. Barker 40). When Mark, drawing on the biblical image of the sacrificial lamb, confronts Gant for scapegoating them, the Corporal rightly points out that “you’re not so fuckin’ innocent.” Although they are not hero-victims like so many of the soldiers in films on recent warfare (M. Barker 43), their position is still ambiguous: They are at once victim and delinquent. The blurring of these categories in The Mark of Cain is prompted, as Odile Bodde argues, by the psychological impact of performing torture (142). To illustrate this double position, the film sticks to established biblical imagery, namely the narrative of Cain: When, in Genesis 4, Cain kills his brother, God puts a visible mark on him that exposes Cain’s guilt but at the same time prevents revenge action (also, Bodde 166). Similarly, in The Mark of Cain, the guilt of Shane and Mark is revealed by visual signs—not on but of their bodies: the pictures documenting their participation in the abuse. Other than in Genesis, though, the young men are left without protection. Their superiors reject any allegations and expect Mark and Shane to bear the blame. In this sense, the higher ranks themselves bear ‘the mark of Cain’ for sacrificing their brothersin-arms. Moreover, despite the biblical motifs, the church does not provide any support either: The army chaplain Mark consults after the night of the abuse can offer no moral guidance. When Mark returns to Britain, he never fully returns home. His trauma, triggered by Godber’s death and aggravated by his participation in the abuse, mentally arrests him in the sphere of war. Home thus emerges as an embattled home/front: The visual style of Mark’s traumatic perception introduced in the beginning now spreads to scenes set at home, blurring traumatic imagination and reality. When Mark goes clubbing with his friends, he stays isolated. The sensory impressions of flashing lights and bass drums on the dancefloor and the exaggerated wailing of the intoxicated become signs of war taking his traumatised mind back to the battlefield. In the middle of the club, he rubs the imaginary dust of Basra from his hair. Moreover, Bodde argues that a recurring shot of the back of Mark’s head becomes a shorthand sign for his “subjective state of mind” (168). For Bodde, the “strongest” of these shots is a traumatic flashback that links images of the grieving parents of one of the detainees with the image of the ill-lit cell to suggest Mark’s traumatic obsession (168). But Bodde ignores the critical shot that precedes these two: It places Mark outside the iron-wrought gate of his own family home. The 11

The scene is framed as an account of Shane and is thus potentially biased; the film, however, does nothing to suggest that he, at this point, is an unreliable witness (BFI, “The Mark”).

6. Film and Television

bars visually cut him off from his mother at the door to signify his mental separation from his sphere of belonging. Subsequently, scenes of war literally invade this home: Alone in his room, Mark begins to compulsively reenact the torture scenes. Crouching on the floor, he assumes the position of the prisoner. The scene at once shows Mark’s guilty empathy for the detainee and places the British subject in the position of the victim. But Mark cannot purge himself of his guilt: Taking a bath that fails to clean him of the haunting Iraqi dust, he deliberately suffocates under a plastic bag, again recreating the prisoners’ terror under their hoods. While the opening of the film suggests a complicity of military and political spheres, in the second half, other levels of home are also implicated: The communal home, embodied by guests at the pub of Shane’s father, hardly acknowledges the return of the ‘war hero’ even before the mistreatment comes to light. The parent notes: “Girls were throwing their bras when lads came back from the Falklands.” “But we won the Falklands,” a guest replies. Support at home is at a low point and turns into indignation when the allegations become public. Journalists aggressively question the people involved, disregarding even the privacy of the family home. Mark’s mother, on the other hand, demonstrates home’s limited insight into the reality of war. She fails to see the trajectory of violence which, from the privileged perspective of the actual television audiences, is self-evident: a continuum spanning from the cruel bullying of fellow recruits to the riots on Iraqi streets and the excess of prisoner abuse. In any case, for the home sphere, the knowledge of the pictures is still more problematic than the fact of the abuse itself because the images hold up a mirror to society (Bodde 178). The pictures ‘contaminate’ home with the wrongdoing of its soldiers at war. According to army logic, the soldiers ought to ‘keep it in the regiment’—a line Shane crosses when he shows the pictures to his girlfriend. After the disclosure, the army tries to seal up the leak; the officers demand Shane’s loyalty and sacrifice him at the same time. Mark’s suicide is the turning point for Shane: At the public court hearing, he reveals the involvement of the higher ranks and deconstructs the official narrative of containment, the story of the two ‘rotten apples.’ At the end of a “journey towards brutality” (Marchant qtd. in BFI, “The Mark”), The Mark of Cain makes the torture explicit.12 Once more, images of British wrongdoing at war come to invade British homes, if on a different level: So far, the fictional abuse had only been insinuated, leaving a visual gap to be filled by viewers with memories of real-life images of abuse. Now, Shane’s testimony, intercut with explicit shots of the torture, turns assumptions into knowledge, visual allusions into visual certainties. Aired on a Thursday night at prime time, the affective im-

12

For a more detailed analysis of the scenes of torture, see Odile Bodde (143-145, 148-163).

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ages of torture invade viewers’ real-life homes.13 This sequence of physical violence, of cruelty, male nudity, and allusions to forced homosexual intercourse adds an affective explicitness to the cultural representation and negotiation of the recent war in Iraq. Overall, The Mark of Cain maps out possibilities of signification—marginalisation, contestation, integration, reflexion—of this side of the war for a home sphere that, though removed from war, ultimately cannot wash its hands of the responsibility for what happens at war.

Female Fighters in Our Girl and In Our Name A counterexample to such stories of return and trauma is Our Girl (2013), a television film about an East London girl joining the army. The coming-of-age story, starring EastEnders actress Lacey Turner, was so popular that it was turned into a series (2014-) that deploys its female lead to the frontline; a fourth season is scheduled for 2020 (E. Jones; Lazarus). For Tom Sutcliffe, the film is basically “a one-and-ahalf-hour Army recruitment film” (“TV Review”). Indeed, Our Girl reverses the story of the traumatised returnee: Molly’s lowly upbringing promises a grim future—a “s***ty little life waiting to happen” (K. Watson); but her prospects take a striking turn for the better when she joins up. The film presents the army as a last exit before Molly follows in the footsteps of her welfare-supported parents. Though “cliched and schmaltzy” (Wollaston), the film is emotionally effective, offering reassurance to its more than six million viewers (BARB). Even reviewer Sam Wollaston concedes that despite the flagrant army-advertising overtones he was “swept along, falling for it.” Our Girl turns on the gender and personality of its heroine. The female lead opens up the “familiar boot-camp trajectory” of the military setting (Sutcliffe, “TV Review”) to a wider array of emotion and sentimentality. Film and series, which takes Molly to the Afghan frontline,14 oscillate between “gritty military drama [and] soapy melodrama” (Hyland). The blend of “‘gynocentric’ genres” (Kuhn 225) and male-dominated army/war setting seems to attract audiences. Sympathetic male roles in film and series are reserved for Molly’s “fierce (but secretly tender-hearted)” commanding officers (Sutcliffe, “TV Review”). Needless to say, both fall for her.15 At home, there is little to be said for men in general: Molly’s father lives off sick pay 13

14 15

In a discussion at Hamburg University in June 2016, some students objected to the scene’s explicitness. Without continuing the debate, it is interesting to note how the reaction attests to the scene’s affective impact. Still, Odile Bodde argues: “Although shocking because they suggest torture, the scenes are not graphic and, for that reason, not unwatchable” (162). From Seasons 2 onwards, Lacey Turner’s Molly is replaced with another female soldier, played by Michelle Keegan, who is deployed to other parts of the world, such as Kenya and Nepal. David Massey’s novel Torn also deals with a young soldier who becomes romantically entangled with her Commanding Officer (chapter 4.1.3.); and, like Our Girl, Torn builds on the empathy and motherly affection of the heroine for a hard to read but arresting Afghan girl.

6. Film and Television

and is burden rather than breadwinner to the family. To secure the help of Molly’s ex-boyfriend Artan in a benefit fraud, the father promises his daughter to Artan regardless of the young man’s “ramshackle approach to sexual fidelity” (Sutcliffe, “TV Review”). And it is precisely this patriarchal attitude that Molly fights abroad in Afghanistan. In Our Girl, the discipline of the military and the challenges of war ensure that women and men ‘be their best,’ as a recruitment poster in the pilot promises—a bold claim given that at the time of the broadcast UK troops withdrew from Afghanistan and “defence cuts [were] unlikely to be relieved” (Sutcliffe, “TV Review”). Even so, the dead-end family home in the film functions as a contrast to the reformative context of a military that imposes order not to control, as Molly learns, but “to save your life.” In the series, the troops may not bring the change to Afghan society they hope to achieve, but the heroine is at least granted the triumph of saving a young girl, Bashira, from her tyrannical father. Female empowerment through purpose and dedication (Molly) or freedom and education (Bashira) becomes a shorthand for the ‘force for good’ in the film. What is more, Molly brings order back to her chaotic parental home and encourages her mother to pursue her own modest career. As familial responsibility is newly balanced between the parents, Molly’s father, too, rediscovers his ‘tender heart.’ The principles Molly acquires in the army and at war invade the British family—for once in a positive way: They change British lives for the better via the reformed soldier daughter. Still, the heroine’s naivety rubs off on the narrative, and the film may baffle viewers who do not wholeheartedly believe in the reformative power of war or the military. A female lead may bring a new touch to stories of war, but it neither guarantees success nor essentially new perspectives. In Our Name (2010), for instance, which suffered under “the general lack of audience interest worldwide in films about contempo conflicts,” adopts a “mode of Ken Loach-style British realism” (Felperin; also, Calhoun) to paint a bleak picture of war once again: Back from Iraq, soldier Suzy shows signs of post-combat stress. Her war experience creates an “unbridgeable distance” to home (Burki) and puts a strain on her relationships to husband and daughter. Reviewers often describe In Our Name in terms of melodrama, whether they conclude that it is “unconvincing melodrama” (Parkinson, “In Our”) or “[w]orthy but melodramatic” (Felperin); others mention but discard the label, noting the narrative’s “suspense without melodrama” (R. Bennett). Still, the melodrama of In Our Name is not simply contingent on the protagonist’s gender but on a preexisting link of melodrama and the war film (Kappelhoff 82), which in turn is based on melodrama as a widespread cultural mode in the context of modernity (Loren and Metelmann, Introduction 9). Telling a rather conventional story of traumatic suffering, then, In Our Name turns home into a “domestic war zone” (Aspinall). Critics are at strife whether the topic of PTSD “is awkwardly handled” (Parkinson, “In Our”) or “a serious contribution to our understanding of this condition” (French, “In Our”).

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Ultimately, Suzy’s anxious attempts to reconnect with her daughter turn into “dangerous paranoia” (Aspinall). The film “shift[s] into thriller mode” (Parkinson, “In Our”) as Suzy retreats to the woods with her daughter to protect the child from an imaginary threat suggested by her traumatised mind. But in this home/front camp, the girl is all the more at risk as she gets hold of her mother’s gun. And for a moment, Suzy even mistakes her child for an enemy. With this setting, the film creates a war zone within the homeland that again compromises the family: a home/front where the mother’s intent to care and protect is superseded by the soldier’s belligerent impulses.

6.1.5.

Genre Films: War Action, War Crime

Another subgroup of films on the recent wars follows mystery, thriller, or revenge plots. Like action-thriller novels (chapter 4.1.3.), action films offer little insight into the wars abroad: While season 1 of the action series Strike Back (2010-) rehabilitates its traumatised war hero to send him back out to war and crisis zones, the interest in war is often exhausted by translating the conflict into a domestic situation of crisis. Hummingbird (2013), also known as Redemption, casts action hero Jason Statham as a veteran haunted by traumatic flashbacks. The opening scene establishes a link between war, the motif of revenge, and a visual style suggesting a chase supported by air surveillance: The soldier, gone AWOL (absent without official leave) in the Afghan war zone to avenge the death of comrades, is followed by military police. Back at home, still in hiding, he finds himself on yet another battlefield: London’s underworld (Johnston). Following the hero’s progress through a story of moral highs and lows, the film aims to tell both a “‘Rambo’-like tale of post-traumatic rage” (Kohn) and a “somber character study” but does not live up to critics’ expectations in either field (Scheck). Towards the end, revenge motif and surveillance style from the beginning are projected onto the homeland, finally reducing war to a foil for home as a domestic battle site: Again, the hero is wanted by the police for avenging the death of a friend who, in this case, had fallen into the hands of human traffickers. In Screwed (2011), another subsphere of home emerges as a domestic frontline: Here, the returning soldier finds work as a prison guard in a facility where corruption is the order of the day. Screwed is semibiographical, but reviewers criticise that its story still descends into prison drama cliché (Hunter; also, D. Jenkins). Cath Clarke adds that the violence in the film is “spectacularly unenlightening,” making for sexist “macho” cinema playing to a “lads mag” audience. Within the examined subgroup of genre films, stories of revenge are a recurring response to the wars abroad. They may direct attention away from the military conflicts towards an alarming situation at home, yet the context of war for these stories remains conspicuous. In Outlaw, a soldier returns to find his wife with an-

6. Film and Television

other man and his neighbourhood taken over by “hoodies” (Gilbey). This “potentially interesting character” (Quinn) gives way to “incredible genre action” (B. Walters) and a plot of macho vigilantism (Papamichael): In the film, which builds on the “cultural constant” of the outlaw (Seal 2), he teams up with a group of men frustrated with the injustices and disorder of home. To right the wrongs of presentday British society, they resort to “the grey area between criminality and political or prepolitical protest” (Seal 2)—and go down in an “exploitative” spectacle of violence (Gilbey). Another act of revenge concludes the thriller plot of The Northern Paradigm, offering a form of closure to the returnee’s investigation of his brother’s death. And at the end of The Veteran (2011) stands an act of single-handed payback inspired by Taxi Driver (1976) (Earnshaw), which aims at two corrupted subspheres of home: Back from war, the hero finds his South London housing estate—which in itself signifies “contemporary social evils” (Brindley 31)—controlled by a drug lord who misleads the boys of the neighbourhood. In a second storyline, also domestic but on a larger scale, the veteran is caught up in a conspiracy plot involving a terrorist sleeper cell and a corrupt intelligence network. As his “post-war demons detonate” (Byrge), he kills both agents and gang members “in a climax of gun-crime carnage … that stretches credibility” (C. Gant). Another “fairly basic revenge thriller” (Mudge) set in the context of recent war is Richard Jobson’s Wayland’s Song (2013): When a soldier returns home to find his missing daughter, his search leads him into an obscure underworld. The setting, cast in deep shadows, monochrome colouring, and an ominous score, alludes to the thriller noir (Morrison) and creates an at times “Lynchian” mood (Palmer). The film revisits the topic of war’s traumatic effect of Jobson’s The Somnambulists and even recycles shots of a burning man from the earlier film in its “vivid and disquieting dream sequences” (Palmer) that blur traumatic war memories and the inscrutable events on the domestic battlefield. To mark the veteran as an ‘avenging angel,’ the film places him in front of a large painting of dark wings. And after retrieving his daughter’s body, he indeed wreaks deadly revenge on those he holds responsible. Avoiding a direct negotiation of the wars on the story level, these films use the hero’s war experience, training, and trauma simply to motivate genre-specific behaviour. On a more general level, however, the films explore a phantasy of reclaiming control over the domestic sphere—even if, ultimately, the avenger will not survive the domestic excess of violence himself—that sets something against the perceived impasse of the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Home Invasions in Route Irish Films belonging to the crime, mystery, or thriller genres are more likely than action films to address the British involvement abroad in more detail. In Ken Loach’s conspiracy thriller Route Irish (2010), for instance, ex-soldier Fergus investigates the

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suspicious death of Frankie, a private security contractor and friend, who was killed on Baghdad’s notorious airport road Route Irish. Due to a minor charge, Fergus cannot leave Britain and thus depends on mediated information from the war zone: A video recording of an incident of British wrongdoing in Iraq becomes the crucial piece of evidence. While access to data from the war zone is problematic, the film forcefully “brings the Iraq situation back to Britain by recapitulating distant horrors [of war] on our own doorsteps,” Philip French writes (“Route”). War indeed invades the private home: Fergus’s “spartan and unfriendly” apartment, furnished only with field equipment, is little more than a provisional camp at the home/front—and a “telling image” for his inner distance to home (Cooper). War breaks in on this home when the central suspect, another British mercenary, returns from Iraq to enter and search the apartment. This literal invasion of war into the private sphere is repeated when he later also attacks the home of Fergus’s translator, an Iraqi living in the UK. This second raid is presented like a ruthless military search operation. In its war-like brutality, the attack is particularly unsettling, throwing a light on the British conduct at war and the military mission more generally. War also invades home through Fergus himself: When he gets hold of the murder suspect, his treatment of the man and the unethical questioning techniques he employs (i.e., torture) again implicate cases of misconduct at war. On the story level, then, Route Irish explores various ways to override the opposition and separation of home and war. What is more, the film emphatically links its fictional home/front to real British life affected by war: Like Owen Sheer’s stage play The Two Worlds of Charlie F. (chapter 5.1.3.), Route Irish casts a real-life veteran—Craig Lundberg, who was blinded during his second deployment to Iraq (Blind Veterans UK)—to play himself in the film.

Serialising War in Silent Witness “Greater Love” (2013), an episode of the forensic crime drama Silent Witness (1996-), demonstrates how home and war interact within the frame of a long-running crime series. Starting with the episode “Apocalypse” (2007), Silent Witness has weaved a number of war-related plots into its pattern of forensic cases.16 The stories are embedded in the crime genre context as well as the more specific configuration of the forensic crime series, which “offers a reassuring final return to order,” Ellen Burton Harrington notes, to ensure the “stability of individual and national iden-

16

E.g., war-related plots can be found in “First Casualty” (2012), “Coup de Grace” (2014), and “Falling Angels” (2015). Other crime series also include episodes set against the backdrop of recent wars, such as Luther (episode 1.2; 2010) and Law & Order: U.K. (“Defence”; 2011).

6. Film and Television

tity” (367).17 The recent wars, Harrington adds, boost the need for stories whose “escapist fantasy … is understandably alluring amid the threats of terrorism and war in the contemporary world situation” (377). In short, Silent Witness is about the decipherability of the crime18 to make sense of the current state of the world; and the medical examiner at its centre, Professor Leo Dalton,19 reinstates order and a sense of security. As a generic figure, Peter Vanezis observes, the forensic doctor has been stylised into a “superhero” (8). Though his actions may be bound by the legal system he serves, he judges according to a universal moral order—just like his literary predecessor, the detective of the criminal mystery genre, who was created as a “court of last resort” (Sugarman xi; also, Rye 75).20 In the two-part season finale “Greater Love,” Dalton and his (usually) Londonbased team, junior examiners Nikki Alexander and Jack Hodgson, investigate the disappearance of a British soldier in Afghanistan. The episode begins by introducing the theme of life—in terms of creation, resurrection, cultivation, and so on—as a value central to the Western disposition (Toffoletti and Grace 72). The theme is illustrated by the symbol of water as a primordial force functioning as a signifier of the home sphere and a sign for the British influence abroad: At the scene of a christening back at home in England, Dalton and Alexander are confirmed as patrons of life; not only do they uncover the truth about wrongful deaths by profession, they are also chosen as godparents for their medical, life-preserving skills. The Christian ceremony, entailing the religious use and symbolism of water, is intercut with shots of an NGO water project sinking a well into barren Afghan grounds. Like the forensic examiner, the water uncovers buried evidence; running over the dry soil, it brings to light the human remains that prompt the team’s trip to Afghanistan. Later, the film emphasises that the roots of the water project—which “has no other motive than to preserve life,” as Alexander observes—indeed lie in the cultural home sphere. Not only is the project described as “spoils of peace” and thus diametrically opposed to war; the head of the NGO, though Afghan by birth, was also educated in the West. Her views clearly distinguish her from the local populace, who harbour sentiments against the project. The value of life in British (and Western) culture thus emerges as a universal good to be exported into the war zone. The opening sequence further juxtaposes home and the extrasemiotic, indecipherable war sphere in terms of life versus death. To that end, the images of the beginning are interspersed with snapshots of a war crime (combining war theme 17 18 19 20

Forensic drama, Sofia Bull confirms, indeed “instill[s] a sense of trust and security”; but CSI’s “perceptive scientific gaze” may also evoke a “sense of complexity and confusion” (65). Peter Hühn comments on the act of reading in crime plots in detail in “Detective as Reader.” Feminist research on Silent Witness (e.g., Nunn and Biressi) focusses on seasons with a woman as leading pathologist; in the war-themed episodes, this position is held by a man. Timothy R. Prchal notes that “detectives fulfill the profound human longing to envision our universe as one in which moral justice can be maintained and crime does not pay” (159).

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and criminal mystery) that is apparently linked to the discovered bones: a British soldier running from the enemy, held at gunpoint by Taliban fighters, digging a grave—presumably his own. Furthermore, the foreign sphere of war is characterised as dangerous and deadly territory when the team itself arrives on site in Afghanistan. On their drive from the airport to the crime scene, they are held up by a roadside bomb. The IED, reifying the incalculable risk of contemporary war, almost kills Dalton, foreshadowing his death at the end of the second episode of “Greater Love.” The relation of home and war is elaborated by implanting a core location of the forensic crime genre in foreign space: The team sets up a makeshift morgue and laboratory—the generic reading place or ‘home’ of the forensic pathologist. Here, he or she gathers evidence and decodes the story inscribed in the dead body of the victim, the ‘silent witness’ to the crime. This space, which represents the rational, explanatory powers of home in crime drama, works as a semiospheric enclave in extrasemiotic space, creating a boundary between home and war where tensions manifest. Because the principles of the crime genre—investigation, disclosure, the restoration of order—are in conflict with the encrypted, unreadable, and chaotic logics of the war zone, the team encounters difficulties in maintaining the functionality of this place of home, such as a power cut and a nightly attack by Taliban insurgents. “Greater Love” not only deals with the case of the missing soldier but also explores the impact of war on the British subject by introducing two British figures ‘infected’ by war. Sean Nugent, a security guard hired to protect the camp, oscillates between sympathetic and suspicious behaviour. He resembles Danny from Occupation (chapter 6.2.), who also works for a private security firm and is compromised by war. Frequently, Nugent opposes the values of the forensic experts. According to their sense of justice, Afghan jurisdiction does not ensure the just treatment of suspects; but Nugent plans to hand over the invaders detained during the night of the attack to the Afghan National Army nonetheless. Eventually, one of the detainees turns out to be the missing, presumed dead British soldier Dan Lambert, the other compromised Brit. Just like the enigmatic Nicholas Brody of the US series Homeland (2011-), Lambert is inscrutable: Has he been turned by the Taliban? Is he—in terms of politics, ideology, values—still British? Or else, can he be reclaimed for the British home sphere? Lambert is, in fact, the episode’s ultimate mystery. At the same time, the series waives any interest in the Afghan other. There is little narrative information on the foreign detainees. The episode shows no motivation to decipher them. They remain one-dimensional representatives of the ‘other’ sphere: Afghan, ruthless, deadly. One of the detainees kills the other without hesitation lest he should reveal the identity of Lambert. Ultimately, the Afghan other poses no real threat to the forensic team. But he eventually takes the life of Nugent—who appears as a threat to British life himself when it turns out that he played a part in

6. Film and Television

Lambert’s original disappearance. Nugent, actually and figuratively, moves and is killed in the death-dealing war sphere without returning to the British homeland. Like Occupation, which refers to the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, “Greater Love” uses an overriding cultural narrative to emphasise the moral overtones of the series. When the theme of life and motif of water are first introduced in the setting of the christening, the voice-over of the cleric performing the ceremony evokes biblical images: “We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water to sustain, refresh, and cleanse all life. Over water the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of Creation.” The episode extends this imagery by way of its title, attributing to Dalton a superhuman moral authority reminiscent of the figure of the Saviour as described in John 15.13: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (New International Version). Though the series kills off its main character in this season finale, Dalton takes his leave by making the ultimate sacrifice: giving his life to save home from the deadly influence of war. To this end, the episode returns to the ‘case of war’ after the criminal case is closed: At the Grand Opening of the water supply, soldier-turned-Taliban Lambert reappears with a bomb strapped to his body. Dalton recognises him but cannot bring the ex-soldier to defuse the charge. Both men are killed in the explosion. At the price of his own life, Dalton saves his team, the crowd, and the life-preserving water project, whereas the compromised Lambert, just like Nugent, is denied a reconversion to a life-affirming British mentality. The narrative returns home to another church setting. At Dalton’s funeral, a sentimental Alexander once again confirms him as a preserver of life: Leo’s interest in death was for what it could teach him about life.… Leo understood life.… We aren’t without him. For that’s what life after death means—that you give so much of yourself while you’re here … that you do not die. In the eulogy of Alexander, “Greater Love” links Dalton again to the biblical figure of the Saviour: The forensic authority’s continuing impact on those he left behind is expressed in terms reminiscent of the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ. On another level, Alexander’s speech answers to the dilemma of the series’ dependability on a continuity of character. For Silent Witness, the loss of its lead character constitutes a disruptive moment that demands a compensatory claim of continuity. The structural break of the season finale, however, cushions the blow of discontinuity. It leads over to a new beginning of the serial narrative with a new leading investigator in the following season. Ultimately, the structural frame of the crime series calls for a reversal of the temporal penetrability of the boundary of home. As a serial narrative, Silent Witness must maintain an equilibrium and return to its starting point: an uncompromised home cleared of the ‘crime’ of contact with the sphere of war and death. It seems that no permanent formation of a home/front is possible in the serial context of

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Silent Witness. And yet, this is only partly true because the return to the order of home in “Greater Love” comes at a price: the harsh expulsion of those who are compromised by war as well as the sacrifice of the series’ moral authority. By the same token, it is significant that a war theme—with its inherent idea of a major disruption of culture—is chosen to ring in such a fundamental change of the series’ story world as the replacement of its main character. In addition, considering that “Greater Love” is not the only war-themed episode of Silent Witness, the series as a whole testifies to the continuous influence of war upon British culture, even if the episodic closure keeps up the reassuring moment of forensic crime fiction. As this overview and the selected short analyses of film narratives with a contemporary war theme reveal, the spectrum of narrative home/fronts in British film and television is diverse. The narratives are linked, however, by their focus on invasions of war into the cultural home sphere of Britain. To substantiate the argument, the following subchapter will present an in-depth analysis of the three-piece BBC television serial Occupation.

6.2.

Close-Up: Home/Fronts in Peter Bowker’s Occupation

The 2009 television drama serial Occupation tells the intertwined stories of three British soldiers who are transformed by their experience of armed conflict in Iraq (Gilbert). At the outset, Mike, Lee, and Danny are part of the same army unit stationed in Basra. Within the first episode, they return to Britain and set out for Iraq again on another tour of duty (Mike) and as private military contractors (Danny and Lee) respectively. Occupation thus shifts settings between the “over there” and “back home” (Tallerico), as the three men compulsively revisit the war zone. Alternating between homeland and Iraq, Occupation creates a context for investigating the nexus of home and war that allows for an increased semiotic exchange between the spheres. Paratextual and critical commentary on Occupation recognises the pattern of return in terms of the soldiers’ motivations: “One goes for love, one out of conscience and the third for money,” scriptwriter Peter Bowker notes (qtd. in Jeffries; also, Lacey 39; Laws). The narrative seems to be preoccupied with war, but the reasons to return to Iraq substantially depend on the men’s situations at home: Mike, returning to Basra for love, renounces his family at home; Lee’s sense of responsibility for Iraq’s future is set against his limited prospects at home; and Danny’s capitalist pursuits in post-invasion Iraq reveal the hollowness of his life at home. The soldiers’ stories in Occupation, just as “realist narratives” in general, are both particular and work as “a synecdoche for something else” (Lacey 37): The serial negotiates the impact of war on the men and conceives of war as a powerful determinant of British life today.

6. Film and Television

Starting Points: Critique and Title Broadcast at prime time in June 2009, Occupation was praised by critics.21 In 2010, it won the BAFTA Television Award as Best Drama Serial (Harper 207; BAFTA, “2010”). In the same year, academic John Caughie presents Occupation in Screen as an example for affective, relevant television, observing that it “deserves more extended analysis” (420). But in 2013, Stephen Harper also notes that detailed readings are scarce (208); and scholar Ahmed Al-Rawi, addressing Occupation in 2016, still only identifies its narrative themes and acknowledges their dependency on the national context. In his article, Harper himself argues that the serial’s critique of the Iraq War, if not entirely absent, is restrained (219, 222): War is lamented as an inevitable “tragedy” rather than “a (remediable) evil” (218-219, 222). Referring to Roland Barthes’s The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1979), Harper explains how, like colonial discourse, the serial “serves to erase signs of political struggle” by presenting war as ‘madness’ (218). The serial deals with “personal traumas and ideological conflicts experienced by the British soldiers at home and abroad” and transfigures the British intervention into “a noble misadventure that ended in error and confusion,” Harper notes (214, 216). In this sense, Harper’s argument supports the perspective taken here not to read fictional narratives of recent war primarily as political statements on the military operation as such but to gain new insights by focussing on the renegotiation of the British cultural home sphere. If Occupation is at least politically evasive, as Harper claims, its title, implying a forceful military presence on enemy territory, might be taken as misleading. The serial’s politics are rather inscribed in other connotations of the term occupation22 : Its residential meaning (‘inhabitation’) conveys a notion of being at home. In this sense, the title stresses the relevance of spaces of belonging for the narrative. The term also refers to the protagonists’ military profession (‘job situation’), which places them at the intersection of home and war. Moreover, the title may signal the men’s inner focus on war (‘preoccupation’): The front experience occupies their thoughts and determines the future course of their lives. In this sense, the title effectively denotes an inversion of the soldier’s role as an active agent of the occupying force and, in turn, renders the men occupied with or ‘haunted’ by war. 21

22

Mary McNamara admires the script for “go[ing] one step forward” in showing war’s “insanity”; Alessandra Stanley praises the “novel take on the war [which shows] the moral complexities of a fractured peace.” More critical voices, such as Rehan Malik’s, find that “by removing the politics” Occupation merely functions as a “repackaged editorial”; and Tim Walker writes that the serial at times “stretched the bounds of plausibility.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition includes “taking … control of a country … by (military) force” (I.1.a) and the “condition of residing in … a place” (I.2.a.); the term also refers to “job or profession” (II.4.b) and “having one’s time or attention occupied” (II.4.a).

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This idea of subjection can also be found in Harper’s reading of the serial: Occupation avoids to identify the British as agents of aggression. Following Noam Chomsky, Harper identifies “problematically de-agentifying” language in the serial and in its critique (215, 218).23 Moreover, the interpretation of the British soldier’s role in Occupation draws on a semantic shift in the cultural representation of the soldier. While the image of the soldier has always oscillated between hero, villain, and victim (McCartney 43), “a seemingly paradoxical emphasis on the soldier as victim” emerged in the context of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (Walklate, Mythen, and McGarry 153). The loss of agency in the shift from hero to “victim-hero” (McCartney 45, 47) substantiates the focus on the more passive connotations of the term occupation in the reading of the serial. In this context, the title may indeed signify the impact of war on the British protagonists and their homes. Once exposed to the reality of war, the three men find themselves caught up in a large-scale conflict that is beyond their control. War is the overwhelming experience alienating them from their spaces of belonging. Uprooted and disconnected from home, they are impelled to revisit and relive the scene of war. Lacey even argues that Occupation is “not … about the Iraq War per se” (40). Examining the possibility of a critical viewpoint “from within” in television drama about the War on Terror, Lacey notes that the serial allows for “a wider consideration of how the aftermath of the invasion plays out” (41).24 Lacey acknowledges the serial’s focus on “personal and domestic relationships” and details that under the impact of war home loses its central function as shelter and space of identification: “home is [no longer] a refuge; it is Iraq that has become ‘home’ for [the soldiers]” (41). Still, Lacey is less interested in the home sphere than in “the unravelling of what passes for ‘peace’” in Iraq: “the continuing violence,” the decline of women’s rights, the “wholesale corruption,” and the “overwhelming impression of despair” (42-43). So far, the complex interlacing of home and war spheres in Occupation has been underrated. The opening scene, which creates a first impression that serves as “a benchmark against which we measure what happens later” (Bordwell 100), is one of combat and thus may obscure the significance of the protagonists’ domestic situations. Yet, despite this sequence, the first episode explores in much detail the soldiers’ situations at home. Even in episodes 2 and 3, which are dominated by 23 24

Noam Chomsky writes in Failed States that the very word “‘conflict’ is a common euphemism”; it undercuts agency and declares war to be an abstract vis major (48-49). Stephen Lacey uses the idea of embedded journalism to describe the perspective of films like 10 Days to War and The Mark of Cain: ‘Embedded dramaturgy’ is a “strategy … to find a particular story that will permit the exploration of a general truth; that is, to represent a complex situation though [sic] the selection of a limited group of characters, whose specific dilemmas will grant access to wider political and moral dilemmas” (37). Thus, Lacey argues, films taking character perspectives “may still offer a critical perspective on the war” (38).

6. Film and Television

scenes set in Iraq, the narrative frequently travels back to the homeland. Occupation strongly contrasts war sphere and home in the beginning, but it also already reveals them as essentially interdependent and overlapping, as will be shown below. Home is never fully separated from the stories of the men’s obsession with war. Tom Jennings notes the same on a larger scale: In Occupation, he writes, “the constitutional violence and obscenity externalised in Iraq are intimately related to our internal State” (34). Home determines how the British soldiers act in the zone of conflict. And, in turn, war powerfully invades and unwinds the relation of the soldiers to their sphere of belonging.

Exposition: Invading the War Zone The story of Occupation begins during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and goes on to explore the ramifications of war in the lives of Mike, Lee, and Danny. While the effects of war are particular (McNamara), the storylines unravel from the same “theatrical-caliber action sequence” (Tallerico), an action-packed raid gone wrong. As an expository plot device, this beginning is no invention of Occupation; the series Strike Back begins with a similar scene.25 Still, for the narrative composition of Occupation the sequence is essential: It functions as a traumatic event, as the trigger for a tale that compulsively revisits the war zone. Within this frame, a more concrete story of PTSD may unfold in the case of Lee. But the haunting pattern of return released by the opening sequence seizes the narrative as a whole. Occupation thus reframes war as a kind of traumatogenic force challenging and irrevocable changing the home sphere. The sequence introduces the men as part of a military task force on a mission to disarm a sniper unit in an apartment building in Basra. Their position is represented as one of disorientation: Without an establishing shot of the surrounding landscape, Occupation opens with a black screen backed by a soundscape of combat. It quickly cuts to an image of the soldiers confined in the closed-off space of a windowless vehicle on its way to the scene of action. Blind as to what is going on outside, the men listen anxiously to the gunfire, holding out in an atmosphere of nervous anticipation. On the levels of cinematography and montage, a lack of stability or fixity confirms the disorientation: An uneven flow of shaky images and hasty cuts between tense close-up shots is disrupted by cutting back to the black screen. The soldiers, imperilled, blind, and trapped, are characterised as passive in a situation in which, ironically, they are on the brink of engaging most actively with the enemy. As the soldiers disembark on high alert, they encounter the extrasemiotic sphere of war as one of inconsistencies and contrarieties: Children begging for 25

Martin Barker notes that the US film Home of the Brave (2006) also “opens with some ‘Iraq war experience’” which damages its heroes “in different ways” (89).

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sweets hold them back before the men, weapons at the ready, can proceed down an alleyway; military aircraft overhead intensify the charged atmosphere. Oddly, one of the soldiers stumbles over a goat blocking his way. The animal’s sheepish innocence—no less than the children’s playful manner before—contests the raiding force of the patrol. In fact, the soldiers’ image is softened by their benevolence towards the children and the physical comedy between soldier and goat. Moreover, aesthetic conventions of the action and war film genres mitigate the role of the British combatants for a contemporary audience unlikely to support the application of force (McCartney 47): The scene uses quick low-angle shots to signal the soldiers’ superiority (rather than the deadly threat they pose), the signifiers of the helicopters backing them up to indicate their legitimacy, and the “counterpoint of sublime music” to work against associations of “savage combat” (Stanley). The stylised sequence defuses the immediately violent connotations of the images. The men are presented as capable soldiers without being harmful or essentially violent.26 These antithetical logics of war are reinforced as the squad enters the apartment building to disarm the snipers. The soldiers run into the terrified civilian residents who are expelled by war invading their homes. Challenged by the presence of war, these literally embattled Iraqi homes anticipate the dissolution of their British counterparts later on. As the men are about to storm the snipers’ apartment, the tension between combat action and residential setting escalates. A young Iraqi girl, Maysa, silently enters the scene of action. Even as the soldiers try to lure her away with candy, the Iraqi snipers blow up the scene, killing themselves and injuring Maysa and a British soldier critically. From here, the stories of Mike, Lee, and Danny take different if not unconnected directions. They will all be haunted by this traumatic incident of war: “Seen through the eyes of the soldiers, the war in Iraq,” Mary McNamara remarks, becomes “a deadly mirror image of Shakespeare’s magic forest, a place to which men are inexplicably drawn and, once there, incapable of escape.” Like the Shakespearean forest, Iraq serves as a counter-world exerting a powerful gravitational force over the men. Compulsively returning to Iraq, they constantly relive the unresolved experience of war.

Homecoming: Embattled Returns The expository sequence ends with Mike carrying the injured girl through the bombed-out city to an Iraqi hospital where he witnesses the chaos and desperation of the overcrowded casualty department. The hospital is looted in broad

26

For Helen McCartney, the trend to read the soldier as victim (in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan) goes along with strategies to downplay violent or forceful images to represent the ill-equipped soldier as a victim to government economy (46) and to conceive of delinquent veterans as suffering from medically diagnosable trauma (48).

6. Film and Television

daylight while patients die for the lack of even the most basic medical equipment. According to Lacey, this place works as a synecdoche of the country wrecked by war (42). Furthermore, it serves as an antithesis to the British homeland, which is introduced in the ensuing scenes as the narrative follows the soldiers to their private homes. The shift to the home sphere is abrupt—and based on rural notions of home that also inform other fictional narratives set against the background of contemporary war in Afghanistan or Iraq, namely Graham Swift’s novel Wish You Were Here (2011) (chapter 4.2.) and Jonathan Lichtenstein’s stage play The Pull of Negative Gravity (2004) (chapter 5.1.1.). The transition from theatre of war to home country in Occupation takes the form of a sharp cut to the close-up of a phlegmatic cow in a dark green field. Home is identified by the “bovine bearer of rural meaning” (A. Moore 168), the cow as a signifier of a nostalgic home idyll.27 Thus, to introduce the home sphere, the mise-en-scène creates a distinct counterimage to the dusty yellow of Basra and the bleak hospital scene. The shot plays on pastoral notions of English rurality to present a peaceful homeland—calm, rural, fertile, and eventless. In the contemporary context, the idyll only holds for a brief moment and is, in the next shot, dissolved into the image of home as an epitome of ennui and inactivity; the camera cuts to a close-up of Mike staring absentmindedly out of the window on the bus ride home. In his mind, he is elsewhere, that is, still at war. The brief impressions of the soldiers passing quickly through the rural landscape are the first to signify the British home sphere in Occupation. But the shots just set up the basic opposition of semiotic and extrasemiotic space in which home and war sphere form a contrastive pair. This opposition is remodelled in the course of the narrative. The fleeting images of a rural home are quickly modified as the men arrive at their individual destinations, which present variations of the (sub)urban family home. The border between spheres will become more and more fractured and permeable, eventually leading to the transformation of home to a home/front, a modified idea of the sphere of belonging that integrates the experience of war. The story of Mike, which traces the gradual dissolution of his family, explores war as an assault on the small-scale family home. In the corrosive post-invasion context, Mike pursues a relationship with an Iraqi doctor although their love is rendered illusionary and doomed to failure. Still, back home from his deployment, 27

For Alison Moore, “the cow-in-field icon” signifies an enduring and “uniquely British rural in the public psyche” (168). Rupert Hildyard underlines the cultural significance of rurality for British self-conceptions: “The ‘rural idyll’ remains a key and contested concept in the discussion not just of cultural values but in very practical debates on public policy in terms of planning and economic development. The value of a literary perspective on rurality is that literary criticism can give detailed and empirically based attention to the meaning of the ‘rural idyll’” (143).

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he gradually disengages himself from his wife and loses touch with his children. The couple finally separate towards the end of episode 2. When Mike, still in uniform, first reenters his middle-class home in episode 1, the house is empty; wife and children are absent. The returnee aimlessly moves about the domestic space, opens drawers, turns on the kettle. The empty gestures mimic the making of home but, supported by the almost aphonic soundtrack, belie the performative power these acts usually possess. The framing and distance of the camera cast the figure as out of place and isolated in his own home. The shots are intercut with closeups on Mike; but rather than suspending the signified alienation, they suspend orientation as in the opening scene. The close-ups visually confine the soldier to the limited frame of the shots and, on a figurative level, signify the constriction of the alienated family home. For the returnee, the house no longer serves as a meaningful space for the signification of home, family, or self. In this unfamiliar home, war is present in the form of its medial representation. A framed newspaper article presents Mike as a “true Brit” and a hero for saving the girl in Iraq. A handwritten comment follows up on the article’s hero narrative: “What a hunk.” And a second note adds a speech bubble (“Arrrrrrrrrrrragh…”) to associate him with the larger-than-life superheroes of comic magazines. Apart from this oversubscription to the war hero myth and the fact that the article is “undercut by ironically juxtaposed headlines about dieting and face creams” (Harper 211), the acting and visual image of Mike in this scene further deconstruct the image of him as a hero. The camera draws back to a medium shot to show Mike’s isolated, immobile figure as a direct contrast to his action-packed performance in Iraq, which the newspaper visualises. At this moment, he is anything but a hero and does not identify with his media image at all. When his family returns, they awkwardly welcome him back. But the scene denies the sense of belonging to be expected. This first return of the soldier to his family is no homecoming. Danny returns to another desolate subsphere of the British home, one that renders him essentially homeless. His small one-bedroom apartment is nothing more than a place to stay; the pink walls and flowery curtains simply do not agree with the character of the wired Danny. Like this physical space of residence, his relationships back in England lack the qualities of home and belonging. The only welcome he receives upon his return are the cursory words of a prostitute: “I’m glad you got back in one piece.” Her visit must suffice as a substitute for a more authentic relationship because Danny effectively has no family. His mother, the only relative the serial introduces, suffers from dementia and, residing in a nursing home, no longer recognises her own son. Back at home, Danny thus resorts to drugs to drown out the emptiness of his life. In a sequence of eccentric camera angles and a deafening soundtrack, he jumps aggressively about his “claustrophobic, soulless” apartment (Harper 214-215). In Danny’s case, there is simply no home to return to.

6. Film and Television

The serial offers Danny two exit routes from his dead-end situation at home: to either end his existence or return to war. At one point, he hangs off the railing of his balcony, about to jump. But instead, he calls Lester, a former US Marine he met in Iraq, to join him in setting up a security firm in Basra. On the sound level, the ennui of Danny’s home existence is at this moment conquered by a hard and upbeat soundtrack that signals his anticipation of the adrenalin-fuelled existence in the war zone. The homeless Danny is identified with the extrasemiotic space of war. Lester even declares war to be Danny’s “natural habitat” and the context in which he works most effectively: “I need me an Englishman to make it work.… I’ve seen you stay cool in a shit storm”—which is ironic given that Danny’s allegedly English aptitude for war is what alienates him from home. In fact, that Danny thrives at war contrasts sharply with his ineffectiveness and inappropriateness at home, where he is a sort of ‘semiotic expat’ without family ties or sense of belonging. Consequently, he migrates to the sphere of war permanently. His new sphere of belonging does not correspond to the geographical or cultural location of Iraq per se but to a semiotic sphere ruled by the logics of war which, in this case, emerges in post-invasion Iraq and the world of the security business. Danny is not only the first to return to war, he also most radically leaves behind his original home sphere, geographically as well as in terms of norms and values. Back in Iraq, he signifies his dissociation from the home sphere by associating with its counter-spheres: He does not only dress according to his occupation as private military contractor but at times even disguises as a local to blend into the unsafe environment of Iraq. Moreover, he associates with ‘the other West,’ that is, with what the serial represents as the US-American mind-set. This is embodied in the character of the bulky Lester, who conforms to a stereotypical image unmediated by much background information about his person. His profile emerges between his appearance as a Marine—confidently helping the British squad when they are blown up by the insurgents in the expository sequence but unrelenting in the case of the injured Iraqi girl—and his later impressive physique and competence as a military contractor. What is more, the United States is characterised by Lester’s capitalist attitude,28 which is carried to an excess of arrogance and decadence in the figure of the American careerist who oversees the post-invasion rebuilding of Iraq. This white-collar worker is literally a ‘paper pusher’: He watches over the distribution of “just under two billion dollars” in cash funds to be invested in infrastructure projects—Euro-pallets full of money that the Americans are allegedly “better placed to spend … than the Iraqis,” as he remarks complacently. Danny’s immersion in this space is marked by the chaos, irony, and ambivalence of the war zone (S. Davies). His return to Iraq is narrated alongside a sequence 28

For Jason Jacobs, the representation of Lester is “the drama’s most prominent failure” as he “figures as an [sic] simple emblem of the exploitation of the war for financial reward.”

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of roadside impressions of his drive through Basra province—a stylistic device repeated later to convey the worsening conditions in Iraq. The sequences, carried by a melancholic soundtrack, show Iraq as a desert, as a patriarchal, religious culture, and as economically in decline. The country oscillates between the hope of a future and the ubiquity of death and destruction: Images of lively Iraqi children are set against shots of dead bodies in the streets. Danny and Lester regularly travel through this sombre, perilous scenery for their security assignments. Escorting a Western investor, they see the lurking threat turn into violent reality when they are ambushed. Still in disguise, Danny seeks help from the crew of a British tank. To be recognised, he desperately peels off the layers of his costume, revealing ever new pieces of attire that might be mistaken as non-British and hostile—until he stands naked in front of the tank’s barrel in the comic closing scene of the first episode, frantically calling out: “I’m from Kirby!” The irony of the visual opposition of tank and naked man is surpassed only by the irony of Danny relying on the support of a home he has abandoned, both geographically and emotionally. Other than Danny, Lee is received at home enthusiastically. His parents’ house is filled with people who welcome him back. Lee’s own reaction is noticeably reserved. Not unlike the news clipping in Mike’s kitchen, a painting in the living room celebrates the British mission in Iraqi; but Lee, too, cannot identify with his family’s perspective on the war and the narrative of successful liberation it entails. The only emotional attachment he shows in the homecoming scene is when he embraces his “brothers in arms,” Danny and war-disabled Taff, “to the embarrassment of his family and friends” (Harper 212). Gareth McLean senses a “subtle sorrow” in the reaction of Lee’s father, who envies his son the “craic with the lads.” The scene clearly exemplifies the disconnection between returnee and home. For Lee, the failure of mutual understanding is most pronounced in his relationship to his sister. Her antiwar attitude provokes him: “You haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.” And while the conflict between father and daughter in “Failure is Not an Option” (10 Days to War) is a matter of political attitudes, brother and sister in Occupation are also separated by what Harper calls “the gulf in experience” (212) between those who stayed at home and those who went to war. This message of a rupture is complemented by the discussion of the issue of social and economic reintegration of veterans into home society. The soldier’s profession is conceptualised as largely external to the home sphere. Though his comrade’s training as an army electrician may be translated into the British work sphere, Lee’s training as a machine gunner is nontransferable. Professionally, there is no place for him back home. And the same is true for his sociocultural reintegration. He spends most of his time on the couch. Briefly, he works as a doorman at a club; overall, however, he remains isolated. Lee considers taking a job with Danny in Iraq, but Mike speaks against Lee’s return to war and against Danny and his private security business more generally: “It’s not you [Danny] I’m worried about. It’s

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the likes of him [Lee].” Danny, as an advocate of the war sphere, counters: “I’m offering him a job. What are you offering him?” He emphasises the failure of home on a larger scale to offer Lee an alternative to the belonging and employment in the private military company. Lee, visually and figuratively placed between Mike and Danny, tries to arbitrate between the two positions but eventually joins Danny’s security firm in Basra. His return to war provides him with work and connects him on a social level. In Yunis, the Iraqi translator of Danny’s security business, Lee soon finds a friend and role model for actively building his own future.

Spoils of War: Deceptive Fantasies In the first episode, the detachment of Mike from his sphere of familial belonging is narrated in most detail. As husband and father, he is the most established character. Other than Danny and Lee, he is not immediately drawn back to the Iraqi war zone. Instead, war follows him home. As shown above, signs of war were already present in his empty home upon his return. The serial further signals his inner emptiness or detachment from home when he listlessly sorts pencils at work or stares at the ceiling when lying in bed with his wife. Eventually, war fills the empty ‘home’ of his mind with an alternative family script. Aliya, the Iraqi doctor Mike met in the hospital in Basra, comes to embody his desire for the sphere of war. They meet again, now in Britain, when both support the charitable cooperation of a Mancunian medical centre with the Iraqi hospital. Their growing relationship is set against the decline of Mike’s marriage. The displacement of the British family is visually anticipated early on: At a charity press conference, soldier Mike and doctor Aliya—with the Iraqi girl Maysa seated between them—visually represent a counter-family. Gradually, the liaison overwrites Mike’s family responsibilities and monopolises his thoughts and decisions. As a direct consequence of his war experience, the affair harms the integrity of his family, the basic unit of belonging at home. The invasion of war into the home sphere is further illustrated by the fact that Mike’s affair with Aliya, which will eventually lead to the breakup of his British family, unfolds in what the Iraqi doctor calls “the famous English country side.” Mike and Aliya meet privately in the scenery of a deep green village setting.29 This location is part of the rural English space that had been established before as a basic signifier of the British home sphere drawing on the cow-in-field icon. In this setting, Aliya conjures up a nostalgic image of the Iraq of her childhood. Employing motifs from his own culture, Mike translates her representation of Iraq into the Orientalist image of a “Venice of the Orient.” Aliya’s reference to the Epos of Gilgamesh in turn superimposes a mythological and philosophical layer of meaning on Mike’s life: 29

Another scene, set in an equally iconic English church, conveys their cultural differences.

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What you seek you shall never find. … Let your every day be full of joy. Love the child who holds your hand. Let your wife delight in your embrace. For these alone are the concerns of humanity. The passage links the family ideal, the point of reference in Mike’s story, with Aliya’s Mesopotamian idyll. For Mike, it is “full of forests and picnics and poems, and all sorts of stuff.” But for his wife at home, the very reality of war counteracts any contentment: “You go out to some shit hole and you hate it; you come back home and you hate it. It’s not exactly a recipe for a happy life.” She repeats her longstanding demand for him to get “a normal job” at home, but he follows his own romanticising reading and volunteers for another tour of duty to follow Aliya back to her homeland. His second tour takes Mike back to a radicalised Iraq increasingly hostile towards Western forces (Lacey 42). Only later will he realise that his return is an attempt to retrieve a sense of belonging lost on his first tour. From his British perspective, Iraq is a sphere where no meaning can be drawn from signs and codes; to him, the place is “mad”30 and, indeed, maddening: “It does things to your head.” Aliya had been a point of orientation: “in the middle of that awful, stinking mess I found—her.” But the idea of belonging to Aliya, fuelled by her nostalgic mythology, is revealed as a fantasy. As the poem predicted, his desire is futile: “What you seek you shall never find.” Back in Iraq, his search for Aliya is to no avail—even when he tracks her down. The narrative shows their separation through “several images of confinement” (Harper 212): Objects such as desks, window grilles, and blinds separate them spatially; religious and patriarchal constraints on male-female contact obstruct communication; and, when Aliya’s presumed-dead husband returns to her alive and well, the bond with Mike becomes yet more unlikely. Later, Aliya even wears a headscarf if only for pragmatic reasons: “I am [an atheist]. I’m a realist too.” For her, the semiospheric border between the cultures is impermeable: “I came back home. And you should go back home too.” Eventually, war will take its toll on Mike’s English home. To ring in the final separation from his wife at Christmas (a holiday that usually unites family members), Occupation uses media images of war, such as footage of Tony Blair addressing the troops, to emphasise the presence of war in the family home. Thus, on the semiotic level, not Aliya but the more general presence of war leads over to the breakup sequence in episode 2. To further underline this interconnectedness of war with the 30

In his article “Terrible Things Happen,” Stephen Harper observes that presenting war as madness without identifying an agent directs attention away from the political dimension of the Iraq War in Occupation (218).

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dissolution of family, the sequence is intercut with scenes signifying the deterioration of post-invasion Iraq. In the figure of Danny, Occupation demonstrates the breakdown of a home identity in the face of war. His emigration to the war zone is permanent and he shows the effects of abandoning home for good. Both Harper (39-43) and Lacey (212, 214) comment on his belonging to the sphere of war. For the purpose of this analysis, it is sufficient to say that as a consequence of his detachment from home Danny goes a way of steady moral decline, illustrating the “wholesale corruption” of the sphere of war (Lacey 43). For Matthew Gilbert, Danny “becomes a kind of Kurtz figure from ‘Heart of Darkness,’” following his “own rules and morality.” In a collage of impressions in episode 2, his role as private military contractor is shown as both wired and dull; it is marked by companionship and greed, decadence and superficiality. With the help of illegal substances, Danny subdues moral scruples to function in this context and claims: “There is no right in this country—it’s just wrong and wronger.” He is drawn deeper and deeper into this system of depravity. Though Danny rarely shows scruples, he occasionally struggles with his existence as military contractor. Towards the end, he even risks his own life to save Lee. Such moments characterise him as a contra-part to his American partner and distinguish the British semiosphere—its mind-set, culture, identity—from the culture of its ally, the United States. Here, political overtones, often subdued in Occupation, are more overt. In contrast to Lester’s capitalist philosophy of “calculated risk” that explicitly excludes empathic motivations, Danny appears as the more emotional and, consequently, more humane character of the oddly matched couple. Yet, this mostly neglected human side of Danny does not safe him from reaching a moral low when it turns out that he was responsible for the (second) disappearance of Aliya’s husband Sadiq. The corruption of post-invasion Iraq peaks in the murder of translator Yunis, who embodies the Western ideal of rebuilding the war-torn country. Saving up to open a pizzeria, the Iraqi opts for personal happiness through economic progress. For Lee, Yunis’s death marks “the point where his own commitment to the war is failing” (Lacey 41)—the moral ambition of the British campaign is no longer compatible with his experience. Lee, deeply unsettled, is sent back home to Britain. But the war, that is, the War on Terror follows him home: Reports on the 2005 London bombings dominate the media. Occupation, Harper writes, “emphasises the key role of communications technologies in informing civilians about the war,” linking the sister’s antiwar critique to the presence of media reporting in the family home (215; also, Lacey 41). Images of terrorism, that is, of the war on domestic grounds invade the home sphere and dissolve the geographical boundaries of war: “Half the Muslim fundamentalists are over here,” Lee states. His sister’s views against the war may be presented as valid: “rational and well-informed” (Harper 215), her arguments “carry some force” (Lacey 41). But the serial, writer Bowker

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notes, was written as “an answer to the fact that the Iraq war was … covered so completely by documentary makers and by people filming it on their own camera phones” (qtd. in John Cook 312). Occupation lays the focus on Lee’s experience rather than Katy’s political reflections (Lowry): Lee’s emotional reaction can barely be contained by the domestic space and “allies the viewer with his pain and anger,” Lacey argues (41). Harper, too, writes that the serial emotionally “‘embeds’ … the audience with the soldiers” (215). Aiming “for drama, not for realism” (T. Walker), the serial explores the tension between the mediated representation of war and the firsthand frontline experience. Again, Lee returns to Iraq against Mike’s advice to right the wrong of war. Back in Basra, he ventures forth into the precarious labyrinth of Basra streets to visit Yunis’s family and make amends. Filmed from a bird’s-eye view, the maze sprawls out over the entire frame of the image. The shot defies orientation and signals that Lee is lost in the semiotic nowhere of war. Unarmed in terms of both weaponry and mental accountability, he is exposed to the destabilised space. Here, the series draws more direct parallels between English and Iraqi home settings under the influence of war: The problematic communication with his sister is now translated to the living room at Yunis’s house. With a voice thick with emotion, he utters his willingness to provide financial support. Yunis’s unsmiling eldest son, who will come to embody the failed hopes for Iraq’s future more generally, is the only one who confirms the family’s desperation. The others remain silent. There is a gulf in experience between Lee and this family as well. Just because Lee left his own home, he does not necessarily become part of the other. Out of place, he instead becomes a target for the violence that controls Iraq. As soon as he steps into the street again, Lee is kidnapped by Yunis’s murderer Abdel. At the hideout of the abductors, Abdel’s conclusion about Western post-invasion presence in Iraq is not that different from the advice of Mike before, though more aggressive: “All you had to do was go home.… You should have let us get on with running our own country.” Harper argues that Abdel’s subaltern voice indeed provides critique of the British role in Iraq but is less than convincing because of the figure’s “unsympathetic character” (213). Moreover, in the hostage situation, Lee remembers his withdrawn, friendless childhood to realise that he is an alien in this sphere: “My life wasn’t supposed to end like this.” When the abductors set up the iconic set decoration of Islamist video messages, Lee reads their scripted message for the camera, again concluding: “My name is Lee Hibbs, and I should not be here.” If this is read as a political statement about the British intervention in Iraq, the self-pitying perspective of Lee again mitigates the accountability of the British.

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Ends of War: Conflating the Spheres In the final episode, the war’s interference in Mike’s home sphere becomes so intrusive that the semiotic spaces of war and home finally merge. To this end, the narrative explores Mike’s relationship to his son Richard, an aspect of Occupation that is underexplored in criticism: The father warns his son against a military career by pointing to his own disintegrating life. But Richard insists: “I’m not like you, Dad.” His father takes the opportunity to confirm the defamiliarising effect of war: “I’m not like me either.” When the son joins up and is sent overseas, the father too returns to Iraq to “keep an eye on the lad.” In this storyline, the war is presented as contagious if not hereditary, passing over from father to son. About to set out for Iraq, Richard, now in uniform, steps out of the family home to be picked up by his father to the meaningful lyrics of The Libertines’s “Road to Ruin.” The song transports the idea that the sins of the father, that is, Mike’s preoccupation with matters of war, are spreading onto his son. The lines of the chorus, “Trust in me / Take me by the hand,” spell out the seductive curse of war. They effectively invite the son to trust a father who guides him into war—if not by word (he advised Richard against joining up) then by his example. For the son, the other sphere of war is something he already encountered at home through his parent. The image of a father holding his son’s hand connects the line to the earlier citation from the Gilgamesh epos that advocates the universal principle to “Love the child who holds your hand.” As a father, however, Mike all too often fails to follow the principle of parental attention and responsibility. Back in Iraq, Mike once more becomes preoccupied with Aliya and her hardships, that is, the renewed abduction of her husband. Again, he ignores Richard, who struggles with the reality of war. To stress the compulsiveness of Mike’s entanglement with war, Occupation repeats the narrative pattern (and much of the images and mise-en-scène) of his search for Aliya from episode 2: Again, Mike exploits his army position to investigate the kidnapping; again, he visits hospitals, talks to doctors, shows around the missing person’s picture; and again, he meets Aliya under the wary eyes of her male colleagues. Moreover, his search once more leads him to the corrupt circle of Danny, who had also helped him find Aliya in episode 1. And again, the appeal to his old comrade will solve the case. As before, Mike is caught in a sequence of wellmeaning but misguided involvement in the matters of the war zone. In episode 3, the narrative accelerates this vicious cycle. After Aliya’s husband is freed, Mike makes another attempt to devote himself to his son. But as soon as father and son come together, Mike is called away and, for a third time, chooses Aliya over his family. In this final repetition of the pattern, the father’s return to the son will come too late: When a riot breaks out in Basra, Richard moves out to engage in battle. Visually citing the serial’s opening sequence, the scene uses a shorthand to convey both the legacy Richard bears as Mike’s son and his confusion and dis-

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orientation in battle. Like his father in the first episode, Richard is crammed into a military vehicle, fearfully anticipating his engagement with the enemy. But outside, in the chaos of combat, he is quickly separated from his squad. Overwhelmed by the violent turmoil, he pulls back into a building resembling the apartment block of the raid at the beginning of Occupation. Panic-stricken he calls his father, but Mike talks to Aliya and is unavailable for his son. Soon after, Mike’s futile quest to save her is brought to an end when he witnesses her brutal execution by the hands of Yunis’s “recently ‘radicalised’” son (Harper 214). Finally, Mike finds his way back to Richard, but it is too late: His son, too, is dead. Mike discovers his body in the abandoned apartment where the terrified recruit sought refuge. At this point, the spheres ultimately merge: Home and war blend in a single space. The emptiness of this family home—the television is running but no one is present—recalls the scene of Mike’s homecoming in episode 1. The Iraqi home is seized by the numbed atmosphere of the earlier scene: It is almost completely silent; the camera’s view is similarly obstructed; and, once again, Mike moves as if in slow motion. Richard lies stretched out on a bed. Like a father putting his child to sleep, Mike slowly caresses his son’s hair. Only then, the camera draws back to reveal the blood-soaked sheets. A medium shot reveals a teenager’s room with sports posters on the walls. The scene’s geographic location is Iraq, but the semiotic sphere is that of the English home now merging with the sphere of war. The narrative construction of Occupation thus charges Mike with having lost sight of home and family responsibility over the deep-set impressions of war.

Home/Fronts in Occupation In Occupation, there is no axiomatic tie between significations of home and war and the geographical locations of Britain and Iraq. Instead, the semiotic boundary between home and war shifts and the spheres conflate across geographical settings. War’s impact on home is specific to the individual situations of the men: For Mike, the key determinant of home, the family, is first suspended by his interest in Aliya, fractured when he separates from his wife, and shattered by his son’s death. For Lee, war suspends his ability for social connectedness and economic integration as the basis for building a life at home. And Danny’s story shows how the erosion of the moral codex of norms and values at war disrupts cultural belonging altogether. In Occupation, the lives of the men all come to a deadlock in the face of war. The serial does not ultimately condemn the British engagement in Iraq per se. Though there are the critical voices of Aliyah, Abdel, and Lee’s sister Katy, they are put into perspective or are delivered by unsympathetic characters (Harper 212, 213, 215). And Occupation relinquishes all hope for a peaceful Iraq by killing of the ‘bearers of hope,’ Aliya and Yunis. The serial in many regards eschews the obvious political issues, such as the original justification of the British engagement and the

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corrosive effect of the British presence (Harper 215), and explores the involvement of the individual, which, in the cases of Mike and Danny in particular, may show tendencies of a “narcissistic therapeutic relationship to their experiences,” as Jason Jacobs argues. Instead of offering perspectives for the extrasemiotic space of war, then, the serial is concerned with the conflicts provoked by war in and for the home sphere—which have their own political implications. They promote a withdrawal into the private or domestic (Mike), present the role of the British as one of frustrated idealism and unwarranted suffering (Lee), or displace accountability into the extrasemiotic sphere and onto the capitalist attitude of the Western ally (Danny) (also, Harper 217). Both Mike and Lee reconnect to home at the end of the final episode of Occupation. War, however, leaves a lasting imprint on their homes and lives. For soldier Mike, home emerges as a home/front in the fragmented remains of his family. Though he is divorced and his son Richard will not come back to life, the serial offers a tentative sign that Mike resumes some of his familial responsibilities when he takes his daughter’s hand during the funeral service for Richard (his ex-wife denies the offer of his hand). Lee also returns to Britain and is finally able to reintegrate. But his renewed life at home is also a home/front permanently marked by war: He finds work counselling ex-servicemen—a profession that not only puts him at the intersection of war and home but also makes use of his traumatic war experience of all things to offer him a sense of purpose and belonging at home. Only Danny is too far removed from home to reconnect. At Richard’s funeral, he shows off the profits he made at war. Even his arguments for recruiting young soldiers for his security firm are the same as before. He continues to reside in the unhomely sphere of war, a life script that comes at the expense of basic comforts of home, such as security and human connectedness. It merely offers him the alternative of the capitalist, individualist attitude associated with the US engagement in the war. Thus, the serial is able to envision a return to and reintegration into a however modified British home but sets it against the representation—or rather condemnation—of Danny’s approach to war, that is, to derive a financial profit from the conflict. Mike and Lee, the soldiers who eventually return home, are both guided by the Gilgamesh tale and its ideal of family and basic human connectedness. It leads them back towards their sphere of belonging. Occupation therefore takes comfort in falling back on a narrative which Jacobs calls “homely, … domestic and … particular: a feminised account that is, unfortunately, depicted as a kind of traumatised passivity.” The recitals of the Gilgamesh epos in the serial certainly carry sentimental overtones. Through this narrative, Occupation first and foremost claims the universal validity of the values which build the groundwork of the British home sphere. From the British perspective adopted in the serial, it seems that these fundamental human values go unheeded by the majority of people in contemporary Iraq—the

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reference of the Gilgamesh quotation is to Iraq’s mythical Mesopotamian past only. While the protagonists may apply the narrative’s moral principles at home, even under changed conditions, they fail to implement the respective norms and values in the extrasemiotic sphere. In fact, the serial may be aware of larger political issues present, for instance, in the antiwar attitude of Lee’s sister and in the critical if “both implicit and fleeting” voice of Aliya or the highly ambiguous views of Abdel (Harper 215-216). The general strategy or policy of Occupation as a negotiation of contemporary war, however, is one of withdrawal, or in more positive terms, reversion to the home sphere in the absence of a progressive or positive influence of the British in the theatre of war.

6.3.

Findings: Screening the Home/Front

As these examinations of British film and television narratives illustrate, the theme of contemporary war is present in a variety of stories, genres, and formats. These films are not perceived as a coherent group of works in a generic sense, but they reveal how the wars are culturally negotiated as an unsettling reality of British life, as an invading force that leaves an imprint on the home. The impact of war not only takes form in images of intrusion on the story level. The subject of war also invades established formats—and is shaped by these. An incident of war may, for instance, appear as the mystery of a crime plot, as in the forensic procedural Silent Witness or the Vera episode “Poster Child” (2013). The generic pattern of investigation thus becomes a means to contain and make sense of the unresolved war experience. In Route Irish, for example, it is crucial to decipher the evidence of the criminal case to come to an understanding of what happened at war. Moreover, the framework of series like Accused or Moving On integrates the war stories of single episodes into an established narrative world of crises in British family or work life. The examined films can also be seen as enacting the intrusion of war into British homes themselves. In many, original war footage runs on screens within the story world or is edited into the sequence of fictional images. The iconic images of the 2003 bombing of Baghdad, for example, are recycled in The Government Inspector. At the same time, the films’ own fictional (and fictionalised) images of war are transmitted to real-life homes. Fictional and nonfictional screens thus function as an entryway of war into the domestic sphere. But media footage is more than a simple marker of war’s presence at home. The films intercut news reports with intrafamilial conflicts to cinematically create embattled homes: When the conflict of Mike and his wife finally breaks out in Occupation, footage of Tony Blair’s Christmas address to the troops runs on a nearby television set.31 Though there is, at this 31

By contrast, Christmas is associated with war-defying ceasefires since 1914 (Snow).

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moment, no other than a temporal correlation between the media images and the dissolution of family on the story level, a causal link is suggested on the level of montage. Similarly, the dispute between the impulsive Lee and his analytical sister unfolds in narrative proximity to media reports on war, as do familial and marital conflicts in “Tour of Duty” and The Government Inspector. Other films reimagine media footage as part of the narrated world. In both Reg and “A Simple Private Matter,” the fictionalisation of original material adds layers of meaning and opens up the factual representations to private, individual perspectives on war. While Reg and “A Simple Private Matter” combine the war or war-related sphere with home on the story level, Kajaki and The Mark of Cain stress the invasiveness of media images of war on another level: by exposing their reallife audiences to affectively unsettling representations of the physical violence of war—a defining element of war that was largely absent from news reporting on the recent wars (Griffin 30-31; also, Fahmy and Kim). Both Kajaki and The Mark of Cain resort to excesses of violence—the gruesome mutilation in the minefield and the cruelty of torture respectively—to explore this dimension of armed conflict. Most of the examined films deal with British soldiers, veterans, or military contractors and their firsthand experience of war. Even home-based civilian protagonists, such as Reg Keys in Reg or Verity in Verity’s Summer, are usually relatives of soldiers. In the examined narratives, the traumatic impact of war affects the mind of the soldier much more often than the body. The psychological effects sometimes find expression in imagined sequences visualising traumatic hallucinations, as in Hummingbird or The Mark of Cain. Richard Jobson’s independent productions use a wider range of nonrealistic devices. Other films emphasise the isolation, visual and otherwise, of the soldier from people at home to accentuate the military-civilian divide of the home sphere. Despite the interest in media reports on war, the examined films rarely deal with civilian figures in the war zone, such as war correspondents. Except for the war photographer in Gareth Jones’s 2013 independent production Delight (D. Green),32 war journalists play only supporting roles in films on the recent wars, as in the Vera episode “Poster Child,” for example. In contrast to the subjective perspective in prose texts and the dramatic performance on the stage, film creates a concrete audiovisual world in which characters move and act. But fiction films on contemporary war are not concerned with the mere visualisation of spaces audiences are already familiar with through news reporting, documentary, or personal accounts posted online (B. Bennett, “Framing” 210; Gupta 12). Instead, fiction films appropriate images and stories of war for a meaningful integration into the cultural repertoire. They create, extend, and diversify images and narratives of war. Film carefully orchestrates and interlinks the 32

The film was screened in the UK in 2014 and at a Russian film festival in 2013 but was unavailable when this study was conducted; the film was released on DVD in April 2019.

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large-scale extraordinary reality of war and the sphere of ordinary personal experiences. This is, for instance, evident in docudrama, which competes with factual formats but adds interpretive or speculative insights to reimagine events (Bignell 196, 197). “A Simple Private Matter,” for instance, shows how docudrama reframes original material to draw attention to private, individual perspectives on war. By newly assembling and interrelating images, the editing sets in motion an exchange between spheres. The home/front in docudrama is created by a frontline between private and political subspheres of home. To negotiate the contemporary war experience, the examined films proceed from an opposition of home and war visually conveyed in the physical differences between the arid, bomb-gutted operational areas and the greener landscapes and more developed urban areas of Britain. In Verity’s Summer, the family home is surrounded by a lush garden. Other homes overlook undulating English landscapes—and convey the war-troubled state of home through overcast and stormy skies (e.g., The Mark of Cain, Reg). In “Greater Love,” home is associated with water as a transformative force that brings life and fertility to the war zone; by excavating the buried bones, water also initiates the criminalists’ search for the truth. Dusty war zone and rural British idyll contrast most pointedly in Occupation, which reduces the transition between Iraqi and British settings to a blunt cut. The Patrol and Kajaki compensate for the visual absence of the homeland by stressing the extremity of the war zone: British troops are exposed to the hostile geography and climate of Afghanistan. The cinematography emphasises the vastness and unreadability of the land, its brightness and heat; the bland nothingness of the desert is set against breathtaking panoramas. In The Patrol, these landscapes convey the isolation of the soldiers in the conflict; in The Mark of Cain, an establishing shot places the British camp in a desertlike nowhere; and the dried-out riverbed in Kajaki signifies standstill and claustrophobia. Urban war settings elicit their own sense of disorientation: In Occupation, the camera captures from above a maze of Iraqi streets that echoes Lee’s forlornness. In The Mark of Cain, these streets are embattled, high-risk spaces of unrest. Such urban terrains epitomise the alienating experience of war and its essential unreadability and otherness. In addition, the wars never appear as strategic and comprehensible undertakings in any of the films. On the contrary, operational objectives are frequently obscure, missions bound to fail, enemies unidentifiable, and their intent incalculable. In the examined films, the transgressive nature of war manifests in the raid, a war-related version of the burglary. In Route Irish, for instance, raids repeatedly signify the invasion of war into the home sphere. The search-and-detain mission in The Mark of Cain functions as a transgression of the British into Iraqi homes that culminates in the torture of the detainees and is later echoed in the invasions of war into British homes. The violation of the privacy and safety of family homes through images of intrusion takes place across the corpus of films. In a general sense, the

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camera encroaches upon all private homes in the films; but the clandestine low angles of the hidden cameras in WMD epitomise the voyeuristic intrusiveness of war in film. The obstructed shots of Mike’s first return home in Occupation (and, for that matter, the parallel scene in the Iraqi apartment) also draw attention to the presence of the camera to suggest observation rather than mere presentation of this home space. That home is broken down into a more ambivalent space also comes to light in the empty homes protagonists return to in Verity’s Summer and Occupation: The camera dwells on the absent-minded figure moving quietly about the house to indicate the deafening silence of these homes. A collapse of domestic cohesion is also suggested in the examined episode of The Street when the soldier’s phone call from the front goes unheard. Home, in turn, suffers from the absence of serving family members (e.g., Homefront, “Tour of Duty”). In crime stories, absences may be translated into missing person cases (e.g., “Greater Love,” Wayland’s Song); and the Vera episode “Poster Child” deals with the abduction of an adoptive daughter from Iraq in Britain. Signs of untidiness in “Tour of Duty,” Homefront, and more subtly in Verity’s Summer reveal how the absences cause disorder at home; the home in “Tour of Duty” is even invaded by rats. In Verity’s Summer and WMD, open doors silently convey the vulnerability of home to invasions from outside. Elsewhere, home can be presented as essentially unhomely or nonexistent: Soldiers may not even have an embattled or inadequate home to return to. Danny in Occupation has neither residence nor family that qualify as home; the provisional furnishings in the apartment of the protagonist in Route Irish suggest that he camps rather than lives at his home/front residence; and the travelling soldier in Verity’s Summer does not even have a roof over his head—his makeshift camp is spatially and semiotically far removed from Verity’s middle-class home. The British home in films on recent warfare is rigorously taken over by war through cinematic means. In The Mark of Cain, home and war are interlinked by shots of Mark’s head against various backgrounds to convey his preoccupation with war and failure to reconnect to home. Home also fuses with the grim setting of the cell, the film’s spatial marker for the torture incident, as Mark reenacts the prisoner’s position in his bedroom. In Occupation, the visual consolidation of home and war sphere begins with the raid in the Iraqi apartment block and culminates in the superimposition of home and war as Mike discovers his son’s body in the apartment in Basra: Home and war become visually interchangeable. Likewise, WMD does not discriminate in terms of visual style between the protagonist’s home and the warrelated secret service world. And “A Simple Private Matter” visually fuses original and fictional footage to interweave the public debate about Britain’s decision to go to war and the moral conflict of the protagonist ‘behind the scenes.’ While films on the recent wars thus emphatically dissolve the boundary between home and war, boundaries within the homeland are in turn erected or con-

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firmed. Reg, for instance, visually separates the private world of the protagonist and the sphere of politics by confining the latter to original news footage. The film also stresses this separation when Keys protests in front of 10 Downing Street: The famous black door is literally shut in his face, and the iron bars of the fence obstruct the camera’s view on Keys’s face. Similarly, iron bars show the cultural separation of Mike and Aliya in Occupation and separate the returnee in The Mark of Cain from his family home. In reaction to the unsettling influence of war on the British home, The Mark of Cain, Occupation, and “Greater Love” deal with overriding mythological or biblical narratives or imagery. For instance, against the backdrop of the narrative of Cain, Shane in The Mark of Cain achieves a moral victory when he shows “moral courage” and testifies against his superiors, even if he is not inculpable himself. Though such references to established narratives work in different ways, they might be read on a superordinate level as attempts to fall back on cultural narratives to cope with the disruptive present-day context of war. Myths or conventions entertained in specific genres, such as the reassuring, even redemptive powers of the investigator in crime narratives, work in a similar way. In action-oriented films like Hummingbird, Wayland’s Song, and Strike Back, the myth of the outlaw and the staple of the action hero are used to rehabilitate the traumatised soldier: He draws back on his resources acquired at war to save someone or avenge some injustice and thus regain control. Arguably, the soldiers in The Patrol and Kajaki, who suffer mentally and physically, emerge as heroes as well; but their heroism is of a different nature: They either stand up against pointless orders or are the enduring survivors of the mangling terror of the minefield. British films set against the backdrop of contemporary war offer a variety of images to express the defamiliarising immensity of war—images of isolation, emptiness, exclusion, trauma, and others. At the same time, the productions create a visual home/front in which spaces, events, and characters of the opposing spheres interconnect—through the visual identification of home spaces with spaces of war, for example, or by narrating a continuity of violence. War is thus rendered in terms available and intelligible in the cultural sphere. Moreover, films explore the possibility of and conditions for a continuity of home after the disruptive experience of war. That is, even if young soldiers kill themselves under the pressure of war, as in The Mark of Cain and “Frankie’s Story,” death does not stand at the end of these stories. Film narratives on contemporary war may not always produce such affirmative images as Our Girl, but even more critical narratives convey some sense of continuity beyond the experience of war as they integrate the unsettling reality into the narrative of contemporary British life.

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

Tony Blair’s statement cited at the outset of this study bears witness to the belief in the peaceful nature and future of life in Britain at the turn of the millennium. In the 1990s, the UK had been involved in campaigns in Iraq and the Balkans,1 but these evidently did not interfere with a peaceful self-image. As ‘wars in peace,’ they posed “no direct military threat to the homeland” (Johnson, Introduction 11) and were in general consistent with the aims of interventionism.2 The years of military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, rendered ironic Blair’s claim of 1997. As “failed interventions” (Norton-Taylor, “UK”), the wars came to “dominate current thinking” about the state of British warfare (Lord Richards x). Instead of bringing peace, the military missions provoked further security threats, such as a higher risk of domestic terrorism through “the radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK” (Norton-Taylor, “UK”) and the rise of the terrorist organisation “Islamic State” (Hussein). In short, the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq “left their mark” on Britain, changed public and political attitudes towards the use of military force (Lord Richards ix), and made war a reality of British life once again. In light of the historical import of these wars, their impact on a cultural level is of particular interest. The previous chapters have shown that the subject matter of contemporary war spread across the field of fictional storytelling in Britain rather than manifested in key works or acclaimed (sub)genres. Fact-based, especially verbatim drama may have been particularly productive in the early years of the wars. But overall, a more varied picture emerges: As theme or context, the wars have ‘seeped into’ fictional narratives across the board (and texts referring to the wars in a merely figurative sense have not even been considered in this study). The emergence of contemporary war as a literary concern thus rather resembles the gradual, cumulative impact the wars exert on the homeland in Graham Swift’s novel Wish

1 2

British troops were also deployed to Northern Ireland, later to Sierra Leone (2000), and to Libya (2011) and went on other smaller missions abroad (Johnson, Introduction 1). Lord Richards argues thus in the RUSI study Wars in Peace; he excludes early campaigns in Bosnia but notes that even there a more peaceful state was achieved eventually (x).

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You Were Here: The “immediate consequences of what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan … were proliferating and increasingly pockmarking the land” (96). In a similar way, the image of the contemporary wars—concrete and impalpable at once—emerges across the field of fictional storytelling in Britain. At the same time, the wars did not become a particularly popular topic in mainstream entertainment, which generally offers a spectrum of pleasures and plays to the desires of audiences (Plantinga 21). But the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq did not bring about peace abroad nor increase security at home and called for a rather uncomfortable renegotiation of the role and justification of war in British culture. In view of this unsettling experience, the examined narratives share a preoccupation with the cultural home sphere. This perspective in itself is not a unique feature of stories with a contemporary war theme; it might, in essence, be present in most if not all narratives a culture brings forth. What is specific to the fictional narratives examined here is rather how they negotiate cultural images of self and belonging in and through the context of the recent wars. In the asymmetrical conflicts, Britain was effectively an invader into foreign territories, purposely playing as active a role internationally as few other countries assumed in the post-Cold War era (Johnson, Introduction 2-3). By contrast, in fictional narratives set against the backdrop of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is war in its various facets that assumes an invasive dominance over the British home sphere. In other words, fictional narratives display no particular interest in the implications of British belligerence on the international scene or for the countries and cultures invaded. Instead, the wars boomerang to afflict the British homeland itself in the examined works. This recoiling of the wars on British culture is captured in the term home/front in the present study. On one level, this perspective casts the British in the unlikely position of the victim, a role that resonates with the presence of the trauma motif in narratives dealing with the recent wars and is also reflected in the narratives’ focus on ordinary life caught up in the vicissitudes of contemporary history. On a structural level, however, the return of war onto the homeland may simply be read as an expression of the cultural process of negotiating the meaning of the wars and the experience of warfare for contemporary Britain. Or, to take a step back, casting war as an invader may be an attempt to make at all conceivable the unsettling experience of these wars: Not only did Britain see the triumph over the Taliban and the overthrow of the Ba’th regime—onto whom the faceless threat of Islamist terrorism was projected after 9/11—disintegrate into costly and self-defeating counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, the country also witnessed more generally the downside of its self-imposed role as a “benign force for good” in the world (Wearing 122). Eventually, this development would lead Prime Minster Theresa May to renounce Blairite interventionism in early 2017 (Robbins). In this context, fiction offers a space to envision and reimagine the experience of the wars in Afghanistan

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

and Iraq to make them available for reflection and integration into the narrative of self and belonging in contemporary British culture.

7.1.

Media Perspectives on Home and Contemporary War

According to their specific competencies, the media examined here use different strategies to respond to the unresolved reality of contemporary warfare. In chapter 4., the British novel was discussed as the medium that most literally ‘thinks through’ alternative positions towards war. In the narrative simulation of interiority (Bamberg par. 13), the novel reproduces the weighing up of different attitudes towards war in the microcosm of the mind of the protagonist or focaliser. These exchanges also find expression elsewhere in the narrative worlds of the novels: in the highly competitive game of squash between the British protagonist and his American colleague in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, for example, and in the conflict of old and new, ideal and real homes in Wish You Were Here. On a structural level, this dialogic pattern also appears in novels on contemporary war that employ an epistolary mode. That is not to say that drama (chapter 5.) and film (chapter 6.) do not find their own ways to express this struggle. A literal fight of positions on war was, for instance, staged in the 2007 version of Roy Williams’s play Days of Significance; the conflicting perspectives in the run-up to the Iraq War are captured in the question of marital loyalty versus political conscience in Sarah Helm’s play Loyalty; and the spatial imagery of locking in and locking out visualises different relations towards war in Cat Jones’s play Glory Dazed. The line between prowar and antiwar positions also runs right through the family in the television serial Occupation, manifesting in the fights between Lee and his sister; and in the television film Reg, the struggle of positions is conveyed through the editing, which ‘exiles’ the prowar decisionmaker to the realm of reused news footage, while his antiwar opponent inhabits the fictional sequences. Chapter 5. identified as a key feature of drama on contemporary war the translation of war from a mediated representation into a performative presence. The physical space of the stage and the liveness of the theatrical event create a directness that neither novel nor film achieve: a dramatic experience of war. That the theatre could set something against the distanced and distancing media images of war, omnipresent and obtrusive during the campaigns, may be one of the reasons why stage plays were among the first fictional responses to the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fact-based plays like Richard Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War rework documented or mediated reality into a dramatic event, for instance. Other plays emphasise the affective presence of the physical body: Plays such as Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity, Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, Si-

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mon Stephens’s Motortown, and Owen Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F. explicitly and affectively stage the impact of war on the physical body. In film, physical trauma is comparatively rare. Effectively, only the mutilations in the film Kajaki: The True Story rival the representation of the brutalised body in stage plays. While drama makes thus specific use of the actuality of what is presented on stage, the novel is capable of creating narrative worlds of varying degrees of truth (Ryan, “Possible” par. 2, 4) to negotiate the contingencies of war. This property, which bears on the imaginative possibilities of representing interiority, is particularly strong in Wish You Were Here. The conventions of mainstream film are more constrictive when it comes to showing what is not actually ‘there’ or ‘true.’ The few subjective or imagined sequences in the examined films draw on conventions of trauma representation to spell out war’s invasive effects on the psyche. The television production The Mark of Cain and the action film Hummingbird, for instance, visualise the recurrent hallucinations of traumatised soldiers. These and other nonrealistic devices are, however, rather to be found in independent film productions, such as The Somnambulists and Wayland’s Song. Moreover, as a theme, psychic war trauma goes beyond such illusive sequences in the examined film narratives. As shown in chapter 6., a notable device to represent war and its repercussions in film is the careful orchestration of audiovisual actual spaces. While the novel is confined to imagined space and drama to the dimensions of the stage and imaginary offstage space, film explores war and home more directly and extensively as meaningful physical spaces—from large-scale perspectives on areas of combat and patrol to obstructed close-up shots of home. Furthermore, film creates meaningful interconnections between these spaces through editing and montage. The immensity of war—captured in the landscapes of Kajaki and The Patrol and, more generally, in the spectacle of combat—thus comes into contact with the minute effects of war on the individual in the intimate interior of home, which is explored in detail in film narratives such as In Our Name or Moving On “Tour of Duty.” The example of Occupation reveals how closely such spaces can become entangled within a single film. At the same time, films on recent warfare play with absences on various levels, starting with the absence of soldiers from home to the inaccessibility of Tony Blair for the protagonist in Reg. Elsewhere, knowledge about war is ‘absent’: In fragmented flashbacks, The Mark of Cain merely hints at what happened in the night of the torture; only towards the end, the film discloses with full visual force the enormity of the transgression committed under the auspices of war. Moreover, film and television narratives such as Silent Witness and Route Irish embed war in a crime story, a genre that habitually withholds information. And Occupation and Strike Back obscure for some time the role of a British soldier in a case of wrongdoing at war. This by no means exhaustive recapitulation of findings from the preceding chapters shows how these media employ their specific competencies to render ac-

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

cessible and meaningful—on different levels and from different perspectives—the experience of contemporary war. That is not to say that war, which was defined at the outset of this study as a complex nexus of events, debates, and experiences, lends itself to an overly simplified spectrum of representation. The previous chapters demonstrated the range of narrative possibilities the media offer to negotiate war. But the investigation of fictional negotiations with a view to reading war as a force invading the home sphere also allows for insights beyond individual texts and media. In the following, the contribution of fictional narratives to the wider cultural negotiation of Britain at war today will be examined in more comprehensive terms.

7.2.

Transmedia Perspectives on British Home/Fronts

In the field of cultural representations of contemporary war, fiction—regardless of the medium—takes a specific place. For its imaginative perspective on the realities of war, fiction provides a playing field for the cultural rendering of an experience that did not meet the aspirations of and expectations for a British military engagement abroad. The works examined in the present study contribute to a process of making culturally conceivable the war experiences in narrative. They capture war as the experience of an invasion into domains of cultural life that is to be integrated into the narrative of self, home, and belonging. As self-oriented messages of British culture, the works narrate moments of transgression between home and war spheres and attempt to reconcile—effectively, incompletely, or even unsuccessfully—this problematic experience with the sphere of belonging and identification.

Opposition: The Spheres of Home and War A prerequisite is the supposition that war and notions of home are incongruous or antithetical. Home and war constitute, in Yuri Lotman’s terms, opposing spheres. In practice, the opposition manifests in various ways, not only in the contrast of the geographical conditions of Britain and Afghanistan or Iraq. In all three media, a conflict of interest between family and war plays an important role (e.g., Andrew O’Hagan’s novel The Illuminations, Mike Bartlett’s play Artefacts, and the film In Our Name)—this is war in conflict with the basic unit of social cohesion at home. A prototypical example is given in Occupation: Mike’s futile desire to save Iraqi doctor Aliyah is the reason why his family at home unravels to the point where his son loses his life in Iraq. Another indicator of the contrast of home and war in the examined works is the experiential (rather than geographical) distance of going to war and staying at home. This distance is reflected in the broken long-term relationship of the war photographer in Catherine Hall’s novel The Repercussions, for instance, in the dynamics between soldiers and Writer in Black Watch, and in the detachment

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of the returnee in the television series The Street (episode 3.3). And this is a distance that cannot be suspended by the logistic proximity of war zone and homeland in a world of globalised air transport, as veteran Charlie explains in The Two Worlds of Charlie F. Moreover, the incongruity of the spheres elicits a sense of defamiliarisation in the examined material. For example, returning soldiers almost invariably experience feelings of alienation (e.g., in Libby Purves’s novel Acting Up, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play Belongings, and the film The Mark of Cain). Motortown reproduces this experience in the alienating encounter at the hotel, which follows the war-like scene on the peninsula. Sensations of estrangement, however, loom large on a more general level in stories set in the context of the recent campaigns to convey how home and war form discrete spheres of experience. A character’s emotional dissociation may be linked to war rather by a narrative contiguity to a literal or figurative invasion of war into the home sphere: In Wish You Were Here, for instance, Jack’s inner distance to his present existence resonates with his dissociative feelings at the military base, which evolve into the spectral return of his brother; and in Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental, Astrid’s estrangement from her family, whose disintegration is subtly linked to the war waged abroad, is reflected in the perceptual distortion of her view through the camera. In these and other ways, the examined narratives in novel, drama, and film maintain the basic opposition of the cultural home sphere and the ‘other’ sphere of war. In this constellation, war is essentially characterised as unreadable and pointless. It functions as a state of exception and destructive force that unsettles ‘normal’ British life. In practice, then, war manifests not or not primarily as combat operations but in diverse shapes and forms across the examined works. Moments of physical or mental violence signify, for example, the presence of war on both literal and figurative levels. In fact, violations of any kind, such as trespassing (e.g., Saturday) and rape (e.g., Belongings), represent the forceful transgression of boundaries indicative of the invasive excess of war. The accumulation of death, impairment, grief, and loss (e.g., Pat Barker’s novel Double Vision), the presence of hostility (e.g., Motortown), and moments of lingering threat (e.g., in the film WMD) also work towards evoking the presence of war in fictional narratives dealing with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More specifically, contemporary war is epitomised by the threat of hidden roadside bombs. In fictions across the board, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) portray war after 9/11 as an arbitrary, incalculable high-risk undertaking, as an omnipresent but inscrutable threat (e.g., Barney Campbell’s novel Rain, Black Watch, Silent Witness “Greater Love”). This risk is presented as pointless and imbalanced: Policymakers take on neither risk nor responsibility (e.g., Reg), readily “pass[ing] the buck,” as Colin Teevan’s drama How Many Miles to Basra? puts it (46); and the civilian majority is implicated but impassive (e.g., The Mark of Cain). The risk of war

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

is born by a small minority, common soldiers mostly, who rarely grasp or endorse the alleged sense and purpose of the war (e.g., Days of Significance). War often has no meaning to them beyond ‘fighting for their mates,’ and its grand objective is obscure, as noted by a soldier in Belongings: “We’re fuckin’ killin’ each other in a place where life is fuckin’ rare. It doesn’t make sense” (ps. 240-242). Therefore, the nature of the recent conflicts creates fault lines of risk and responsibility in the home sphere. Fictional representations of the two largely simultaneous wars overlap in many regards. In some respects, however, the narratives distinguish between the conflicts as literary topics. Fictions of the early Iraq War, a campaign contested from the start, often focus on the lack of justification (e.g., Saturday, Richard NortonTaylor’s play Called to Account, 10 Days to War). Broadly speaking, this war creates a rift between political prowar and private antiwar subspheres of home. Early texts on the Afghanistan War, such as Double Vision (2003), are rare and not yet characterised by the sense of futility that is characteristic of later representations, such as The Illuminations (2015), Belongings (2011), and The Patrol (2013). Though it is the earlier campaign, the war in Afghanistan only takes over as the dominant reference for literary representations of contemporary war towards the end of the 2000s. In light of the extended duration of British military presence abroad, these later texts reveal a war-weariness and call into question the legitimacy of this intervention as well—not because the motivation to wage war in Afghanistan appears doubtful, but because the war fails to achieve the aims of Britain’s security policy and moral mission to export peace, progress, and democracy. In the examined narratives, war is chiefly approached from an experiential perspective. Even if they consider the historical specificities of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the texts are not interested in merely restating ‘the facts.’ Instead, war works as an extrasemiotic complement of home: War is not presented as history to be narrated but as an unresolved experience that disrupts British life today. Even fact-based fictions like David Hare’s play Stuff Happens or the television productions 10 Days to War and The Government Inspector reimagine events from the personal perspectives of those involved. Fiction thus responds to the representation of war in news media: Mediated images, though intrusive, do not equal a firsthand experience and are deemed insufficient to render meaningful the reality of war. Therefore, to bring together events and experience, fictional narratives offer spaces of reflection, affective live events, new narrative contexts for news media images, and new links between the distant large-scale event of war and the experiential realm of characters and audiences. Fiction both imparts war’s extremeness (McLoughlin, Authoring 16) and breaks it down to more accessible levels, as in the eruption of violence in Motortown, in the close-up on the frontline deaths in Rain and Wish You Were Here, or in the mutilations in Kajaki.

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War as an extrasemiotic space entails a gap of signification that manifests in the representation of the war zone: Across media boundaries, Iraq and Afghanistan appear as a meaningless nowhere, a wasteland or no-man’s-land (e.g., Patrick Bishop’s novel Follow Me Home, Belongings, The Patrol). In these open landscapes, the British camp forms an enclave of home in hostile surroundings (e.g., David Massey’s novel Torn, Our Girl). Follow Me Home exemplifies how the camp—the home referred to in the title—stands in for the cultural sphere of belonging. But the camp as a substitute of home can hardly live up to an ideal of security, belonging, and community. Camp life is often corrupted. In affirmative narratives, such as the television series Our Girl, interference comes from outside. The camp comes under fire or is ‘invaded’ by foreigners, whose intentions are doubtful at least (e.g., captives, translators). Elsewhere, the enclaves of home bear conflict or aggression themselves (e.g., Accused “Frankie’s Story,” Motortown). The Mark of Cain realises both the separation of camp and war zone and the illusory nature of this separation: The Major’s moral appeal in the camp is a clear contrast to the riotous reality of Basra streets outside; but later, life in the camp itself appears as corrupted and abusive, linking home and war through a continuity of violence. Moreover, a key message of the examined works is the obscurity, otherness, and enormity of war. In film, the wide, even sublime vistas of foreign landscapes present largely ‘empty’ spaces (e.g., Kajaki). Devoid of meaning for British protagonists and audiences, the panoramas are as disorienting as the cinematic spectacle of urban battle (e.g., Occupation). But the immensity of war is demonstrated in all of the examined media: for example, in imagining the Iraqi desert as an open stage for war in Saturday, through the outrageousness of Motortown’s onstage murder, and in the impressive soundscape of war that bypasses the spatial limitations of the stage in both The Pull of Negative Gravity and Simon Stephens’s play A Canopy of Stars. War is also presented as disorienting through the labyrinthine performance venue of the first staging of Adam Brace’s play Stovepipe, the maze of Basra streets in Occupation, and the confusing city flooded with antiwar protesters in Alison Miller’s novel Demo. In contrast to this image of war in the examined works, home is thought of as a space of familiarity, of all that is safe, peaceful, meaningful. Idealised homes, like the glorified childhood home in Wish You Were Here or Vi’s hopes for a continuity of farm and family in The Pull of Negative Gravity, may come close to the prototypical home as defined at the outset of this study: a safe, intimate space of belonging (chapter 2.2.). But the crucial characteristic of home in fictional narratives of contemporary war is really their essential vulnerability. Apart from an idealised imaginary entertained by individual characters, then, there is no positive characterisation of home as a unified, unspoilt space of belonging. Rather, it is the threat to or infraction of the integrity of home that renders visible an ideal of order,

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

security, and belonging—and precisely this violation is epitomised by presenting war as an invasion.

The Breakdown of the Boundary: Home as Home/Front The material examined in the present study carefully orchestrates the representation of the cultural home sphere of Britain to reframe it as a complex home/front that is indelibly marked by a powerful invasion of war. To begin with, home subsists in the tension of an ideal enshrined at the centre of the semiosphere—the counterpart to war—and the heterogeneous reality beyond. Taking account of this tension, the homes in the examined works are never intact. They are always already challenged in some way or another: War may have already left its mark on home at the outset of the narrative or there is a preexisting condition which, activated or aggravated by war, interferes with the integrity of home. Accordingly, the conflicts and issues addressed in the texts do not necessarily originate in the war sphere. In fact, the narratives frequently deal with established domestic problems, such as the dissolution of the family (e.g., The Accidental, Tash Fairbanks and Toby Wharton’s play Fog, Occupation), the decline of traditional forms of rural life (e.g., Wish You Were Here, The Pull of Negative Gravity), the limited prospects of lower-class adolescents (e.g., “Frankie’s Story,” Days of Significance), sexist attitudes (Belongings), marital problems (Verity’s Summer), or mental issues (Motortown). Occasionally, this presence of problems closer to home led to the belief that stories of contemporary war, explicitly Motortown and the film Verity’s Summer, are not really about war. Such readings, however, appear to exclude the possibility of more complex cause-effect relations in fiction and seem to assume that war must be discussed independent of domestic problems. Instead, war and issues of home are interlinked in the examined stories—if not on a causal level then by way of the narrative constellation. Through the familiar code of the domestic issue, war is translated, in Lotman’s sense, into a meaningful experience. For example, in Motortown, the violent excess of war is recast in the murder on the peninsula, which is much closer to the reality of home; and in Verity’s Summer, the wilful ignorance of British wrongdoing at war is broken down into the marital dynamics of Verity’s parents. In turn, war serves as a new context for the domestic problems, prompting the autocommunicative renegotiation of the cultural self-image as defined by Lotman (chapter 3.1.; also, below). In other words, the examined works rethink home through the prism of war and its patterns of violence and intrusion. The presumed opposition of home and war is, from the beginning, a nominal opposition. Just as home is never present as an unspoilt ideal, home and war constitute no absolute, fixed, sustainable contrast. War’s destabilising influence is always already perceptible to challenge the positive notion of the British cultural self. Offshoots of war may even turn out to be indigenous to the heterogeneous

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sphere of culture, for instance, in the references to the history of British warfare and war remembrance (e.g., Wish You Were Here, Black Watch, and The Two Worlds of Charlie F.) or in the claim of a continuity of violence between home and war (e.g., The Mark of Cain and Motortown). An important function to further transcend the separation of home and war in the examined narratives is realised by spaces of transition interposed between the spheres. Such spaces often carry features of what Michel Foucault introduces as heterotopias: spaces that resemble the home sphere but at the same time overturn the conditions of culture (chapter 3.3.). Heterotopias can work as transitional spaces because they lie outside of society in the sense that they form delimited subspheres in the periphery of the semiosphere. Heterotopias do not simply deviate from the familiar sphere of belonging; though set apart, they are mirror images of culture which, by nature, are not as inconsistent with home and not as inconceivable as the extrasemiotic experience of war. As effective subspaces of home, they are culturally established, enclosed and thus unthreatening, delimited and tangible. In the examined works, the features of the heterotopic spaces serve to apprehend the otherness of war and contain its unsettling presence. The unthreatening otherness of, in this case, recreational or holiday spaces comes to mediate the threatening otherness of war: In Wish You Were Here, airports are used as a template for the war-infused military airbase and peaceful Caribbean islands are linked to the deserts of Iraq; and similarly, the hotel in Motortown provides a space for extramarital fantasies to ‘protect’ the family home. In the examined films, which stand in the context of the war film genre and its representation of actual scenes of combat on screen, heterotopias play a less prominent role than in novel and drama. Still, there are at least some examples, such as the prison in Screwed. Also, the Iraqi hospital in Occupation is such a “counter arrangement” of the actualised ideal of controlling disease (Foucault 332). Ruled by Western medicine, the hospital is both recognisable for British characters and audiences and safely conveys the otherness of war-torn Iraq. In the serial, the conditions at the hospital deteriorate to make conceivable the erosion of freedom, peace, and progress in post-invasion Iraq. Another transitional space explored at large is the military subsphere, a space both part of home and invested in the business of war. Depending on the perspective, the military works as a British enclave in the war zone or marks the presence of war within British culture. Army settings abound in the examined media (e.g., Rain, D.C. Moore’s play The Empire, Our Girl). More specific to the contemporary context is the focus on private military contractors (e.g., Route Irish, Stovepipe, Occupation). This profit-oriented, dangerous line of occupation is, like the IED, at odds with a risk-averse home culture and its allegedly humanitarian policy of intervention. The war context in general throws into relief the boundary between military and civilian subspheres; they are ruled, for instance, by mutually exclusive codes (e.g., Motortown, The Mark of Cain). The army also serves as an alternative to farm life

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

(Wish You Were Here) or as a contrast to an academic education (Days of Significance); and military training is presented as mind- and life-changing and the return to a civilian existence often problematic (e.g., The Two Worlds of Charlie F., Black Watch). Still, this life-altering effect may also be narrated in positive or reformative terms (Our Girl). In the British military tradition, culture embraces war-related traits. In the examined texts, the army may determine the careers of generations (e.g., The Illuminations, Occupation) or control entire communities (e.g., “Tour of Duty,” Homefront) to suggest the militarist propensity of British culture. Cultural institutions like the emblem of the poppy (e.g., Basham, “Gender”), Remembrance Sunday, or the Wootton Bassett rituals (Jenkings et al. 357) bear further witness to military facets of British culture. In the texts, military remembrance operates as a stabilising response to war (e.g., Wish You Were Here, Black Watch, Homefront). This cultural vein for the military—not uncontested yet reinforced in the context of recent wars by various initiatives (J. Kelly 724)—may play into the success of the military drama Our Girl. The cultural home sphere in the examined works is traversed by various internal boundaries beyond the civil-military divide. These frontlines often run between superordinate and lower levels of home: The scale of war alone implicates national, public, political, or cultural levels of home. In this context, the issue of a shared responsibility arises, especially in narratives that directly address the illegitimacies of the wars (e.g., Melissa Benn’s novel One of Us, Justifying War, 10 Days to War). The Mark of Cain, for instance, begins with the culpability of the private soldiers but then expands the circle of those responsible onto commanding levels, politics, and the public. Also, the internal rift manifests in an indifference of the home community towards the young men who are sent to war naive and unprepared. Respective narratives underscore the accountability of people at home for the mental suffering and wrongdoing of the soldiers (e.g., Days of Significance, “Frankie’s Story,” The Mark of Cain)—and implicate their real-life audiences as well. Other works target political and military leadership for the inadequate supply of their troops (e.g., Stovepipe, The Patrol) or for failing to present them with a relatable objective (e.g., The Illuminations, Glory Dazed). And Black Watch gives an insight into the Officer’s viewpoint, which reveals something of the unadmitted self-critique of the higher military levels. When it comes to the individual, the position of the British in the conflicts is presented as one of powerlessness. The narratives do not go so far as to effectively state the innocence of the British forced to fight a war against an ‘axis of evil,’ as post-9/11 US rhetoric suggested. But, across media boundaries, the British individual is emphatically afflicted by war—not inculpable but overwhelmed and without

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control.3 Civilian individuals, regardless of their limited scope of influence and distance to combat action and political policy-making, have to realise their own involvement in war. This takes place at internal boundaries of the home sphere, often manifest as actual borders within the narrated world: In Wish You Were Here, a guilty awareness to be part of a nation seizes the hero as he traverses the Solent on his journey to the military airbase; antiwar protesters spill over into the neighbourhood of the protagonist in Saturday, prompting him to examine his own position towards war; and in Days of Significance, the intrusive demands to take position are enacted as a transgression of family, friends, and peers into the personal space of the protagonist outlined as a square on the floor. The context of war gives prominence to the conflicts between strata of home (Korte and Schneider, Introduction 2-3), between powerful and private, central and peripheral sections of British life. Vulnerable to influences from outside, home is marked by internal asymmetries, inconsistencies, and distortions: The political, for instance, is beyond the reach of the private man (Reg) and dismantles private friendships (One of Us), traditional notions of home clash with contemporary realities (e.g., Wish You Were Here, The Pull of Negative Gravity), and educated with lower classes (e.g., Saturday, Days of Significance). These conflicts are further explored by pulling down apparently natural barriers of home. Personal encounters with Tony Blair, for example, override the detachment of the world of politics from private life (e.g., Saturday, Loyalty); and Black Watch separates higher from lower ranks only until war takes British lives and the Officer steps down from the scaffolding. The basic social unit of the family is a common denominator for presenting British life on a manageable scale in the examined works. The family is the key home/front battlefield in fictions dealing with recent wars. Family homes can be roughly divided into urban and rural. The latter is presented as a strained ideal based on a romanticised idyll (e.g., The Pull of Negative Gravity, Wish You Were Here). Rural homes and communities, mixing private and work life, are threatened economically (e.g., Double Vision, Molly Davies’s play A Miracle). In the examined fictions, recent wars are repeatedly linked to livestock epidemics. Such an exchange of codes between the spheres creates an interplay between the excess of war and the crisis of the British agricultural sector that at once renders conceivable the distant war by way of the domestic crisis and reappraises the devastating effects of epidemics like BSE. Urban homes, on the other hand, are isolated, intimate units of British life marked by a cosmopolitan mind-set (e.g., Demo, Saturday). The privacy of the family

3

The failure of Britain on the operational level was also presented as beyond its control: “[The UK] worked with allies—and was in most cases a junior partner to the US—and was embedded in an international environment it could not control” (Lord Richards xi).

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

residence stands out in the densely populated city, making it particularly vulnerable to intrusion from outside. In the narratives, the invasiveness of war manifests as a series of burglaries or raids. These powerful images of intrusion may be directly related to war if the threat is posed by soldiers or antiwar protesters (e.g., Belongings, Route Irish, Loyalty). But a burglary is as often an image of the intrusive force of war in a more general or figurative sense (e.g., Saturday). Other kinds of invasion signify on a metaphorical level as well, like the rat infestation in “Tour of Duty,” which subverts the notion of a safe and sanitary home. Burglaries and similar transgressions break down the presence of war into a comprehensible experience, namely the outrageous violation of the supposedly safe space of the family home. The cleared-out apartment in The Accidental denotes the most radical suspension of home by way of a burglary and signifies, by extension, the invalidation of the identificatory function of the homeland through the invasive presence of war. Invasions occur on various levels of the examined narratives: War as a theme ‘invades’ genres to be mediated through the established generic codes (e.g., “Greater Love”); original war footage is ‘recycled’ in fictional narratives (e.g., Saturday, Reg); and fictions of war themselves effectively and affectively invade reallife spaces of audiences (e.g., Black Watch, Kajaki). Moreover, the idea of invasion implies a movement over boundaries that gives significance to the figure of the soldier as a traveller between homeland and war zone. Even the dead soldier of Wish You Were Here fulfils his function of being a harbinger of war. The only civilian of a similar itinerant capacity is the war correspondent or war photographer. Soldiers and war reporters are equally uprooted characters who lack family ties and a meaningful integration into life back at home (e.g., James Meek’s novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, Catherine Hall’s The Repercussions). In fact, they are often essentially homeless or reside in unhomely homes (e.g., Double Vision, Motortown, Occupation). At the same time, these travellers provide a human perspective on the events of war and thus work as mediators of war at home (Korte, “Touched” 184). These figures also illustrate the most direct impact of war on the individual mind, basically the smallest level of home in this study. What the event of the burglary—which is essentially a perturbation of the identificatory space of home (chapter 2.2.)—spells out in physical terms, trauma conveys on a psychological and, in terms of bodily symptoms, physiological level: an experience of invasion caused by war. In the examined material, the effect of war on the mind can go beyond a narrow definition of trauma: Anxieties, disillusion, the loss of a sense of purpose and meaning thwart the individual’s sense of belonging and self-image more generally. The individual’s subjection to war resonates with the image of war as a game, prominent in the examined plays, which also entails the idea of being subject to war’s caprices. Still, many of the narratives understand trauma as a pathological condition, although they do not adopt a detailed medical perspective. Instead, the texts explore the individual perception affected by the disruptive event of war,

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which creates an alternate reality and suspends the connection to the British home sphere—for trauma is largely a condition of British characters: The brief shots of the torture victims’ empty eyes in The Mark of Cain, for instance, cannot express the ‘strange temporality’ of trauma (chapter 3.2.) that is conveyed by the far more nuanced representation of Mark’s state of mind; the suffering of the Iraqi women in The Repercussions is not caused by war but by domestic violence; and the wrongdoing of Yunis’s son in Occupation is not marked in particular as a traumatic effect of the death of his father whereas Lee’s breakdown is. As in the context of World War I or the Vietnam War, the trauma of the British soldier is a staple in narratives of contemporary war (e.g., The Illuminations, The Two Worlds of Charlie F., The Mark of Cain). Trauma epitomises the effect of war in terms of suffering, victimhood, and loss of control over memory, mind, and emotive response. What is more, trauma corresponds to the idea of war as an invasion. Like war, which transgresses the boundary of the home sphere, trauma is the “breach of a border” and forcefully confounds “systems that were once discrete, making unforeseen connections” (Luckhurst, The Trauma 3). For the traumatised soldier (e.g., in Liz Trenow’s novel The Poppy Factory, Motortown, In Our Name) or war reporter (e.g., in Double Vision), the traumatic perception and the reality of home become blurred. There is another reason why trauma narratives lend themselves to negotiate the invasion of war into contemporary British life: their turn from the paralysing, overpowering effect of trauma—exemplifying the unsettling and incapacitating effect of war—to a narrative of overcoming, which conveys a safe, controlled integration of war into the narrative of self and belonging. Even if traumatised soldiers struggle to reintegrate at home (e.g., Acting Up), may be driven back to war (Lee in Occupation), or even commit suicide (Peter in “Frankie’s Story”), the narratives go on to tell a story that entails a prospect for the continuity of home, however tinged by war. Even Shane, convicted to serve time in prison at the end of The Mark of Cain, at least achieves a moral victory of ‘doing the right thing.’ Here and elsewhere, trauma is overcome by (re)narrating or (re)enacting the traumatic episode (e.g., The Poppy Factory, The Two Worlds of Charlie F.). The action film has its own strategy: to indulge in the spectacle of violence and the fantasy of the individual asserting himself (rarely herself) against a bad or corrupted authority (Wulff, “Action-Film”). Regularly, the traumatised action hero employs his physical and mental abilities acquired at war to answer strategically and forcefully to a domestic crisis (e.g., Hummingbird, Wayland’s Song; similarly, Strike Back). Even if their perspective on the contemporary campaigns themselves remains superficial, these narratives capitalise on the possibility of trauma narratives to make “unforeseen connections” (Luckhurst, The Trauma 3) between war and home. For the soldier, war also manifests in physical traumata. The body is thus another, distinctly material sphere ‘invaded’ by war in form of physical violence. Vio-

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

lations of the body at war range from the most extreme case of death on the battlefield to permanent impairment, such as amputations and disfigurement, as well as the reinterpretation of the soldier’s body in training as a target for the disruptive forces of war (The Two Worlds of Charlie F., Motortown). The theatre can present bodies threatened by war through actors’ bodies actually present on stage and thus achieve a particularly affective impression. But other media also explore the physical violence of war: for instance, battlefield deaths (Wish You Were Here, Rain), attempted rape and rape victims (Saturday, Double Vision, Glory Dazed), the execution of torture (The Mark of Cain), and bodily disfigurement (Kajaki, The Illuminations). This violation of the integrity of the body stands in for the violation of other aspects of the individual and cultural self. Affecting the physical essence of what it means to be (to exist), bodily injury provides a particularly outrageous imagery for the representation of contemporary war as an invasion into the British cultural home sphere.

Autocommunication: Holding Up the Mirror The present study has shown how narratives on contemporary war negotiate British culture in the context of war by transforming home into a home/front. After the end of the Cold War, the self-image of Britain as a military power was focussed on an idea of moral and extraverted interventionism. Against the backdrop of recent conflicts, war manifests again as a more direct, more complex experience that extends onto the cultural home sphere. While some of the examined fictional narratives also deal with the political dimensions of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, altogether the examined works are concerned with the negotiation of the British home sphere prompted by war as an external (or externalised) trigger. The wars may thus also be understood as a (nonsemiotic) impulse to renegotiate what it means to be at home in the sphere of British belonging and identity in terms of Lotman’s autocommunication (chapter 3.1.). Given the variety of fictional narratives as well as the provisional status of the examined wars, final or exhaustive conclusions of how the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq changed the British ‘look at ourselves’ may be premature. Still, in terms of autocommunicative processes, the material reveals some tendencies that should not be overlooked. First of all, the analysis of the material has shown that despite the contact with an extrasemiotic ‘otherness’ inherent in the idea of war, war in the examined narratives rather throws into sharp relief the internal boundaries that organise home culture. As in all autocommunicative processes, the information itself is not newly discovered. The message rather reappears within the internal communication of a given culture. That is, autocommunication is “[c]ommunication to oneself of already known information” (Lotman, Universe 21). Consequently, in the examined texts war calls attention to established problematics, such as inequality (e.g., Saturday, The Empire, “Frankie’s

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Story”), conditions of exclusion or detachment that convey a disunity of the social fabric (e.g., The Illuminations, The Accidental, David Hare’s play The Vertical Hour, Reg), or internal violence and violations (e.g., Motortown, Glory Dazed, The Mark of Cain). In Belongings, the loss of the social cohesion of the home sphere through war is pointedly presented in the literal exclusions from and entrapments in the British pub setting. The play’s title further confirms this central concern. In light of Lotman’s observations on autocommunication, home is examined in narratives of recent war in terms of belonging and unity not in spite of the context of war but because of the presence of war as a supplementary code in the communication. Lotman writes: “the message is reformulated and acquires new meaning during the communication process. This is the result of introducing a supplementary, second, code” (Universe 22; emphasis added)—which is, in the context of this study, war. In fact, the narrative of a ‘breakup of Britain’ does not originate in the context of the wars: According to Jon Cook, “the perceived current crisis in British or English national identity” reaches back well into the twentieth century, and possible causes reach from devolution (Tom Nairn) to postcolonial ethnicities (Homi Bhabha) and globalisation (Slavoy Žižek) (Jon Cook 17). Thus, the wars play into existing cultural sensitivities but provide a specific contemporary historical frame to recast the narrative of a breakup. Within this frame of war, the home sphere not merely appears as a sphere with a troubled sense of self but as an embattled home sphere set against an exterior that makes demands on the home. To expose (and lament) the disruption of home is a key scheme in the examined texts. Reg, for instance, and The Pull of Negative Gravity stage this at large. But in their different ways, the fictions on contemporary war also seek to overcome the disunity of home. They negotiate the involvement of a wider home community (e.g., Verity’s Summer, Motortown, The Mark of Cain) or they press their irresolute or reluctant protagonists to take a position in the public debate on the wars (e.g., Saturday, Days of Significance). And while Stovepipe coerces its audience to ‘join in’—if ostensibly only to sing along with the cast in the end—, The Two Worlds of Charlie F. insists on the reunification of home, predicating that there is but one world and “don’t you ever forget it” (85). Moreover, as a response to the overwhelming invasion of war, a return to family is offered across the examined narratives. In the face of war, the fictions ‘rediscover’ this basic constituent of community and belonging. In the television serial Occupation, it becomes especially clear that this—the family home/front—is the ‘battlefield’ where the British are able to yet gain a victory, while the war in Iraq becomes increasingly meaningless, incoherent, and empty over the course of the narrative. War appears as the rivalling sphere in which the British have lost themselves and their commitment to the family at home. Novel (e.g., The Illuminations) and drama (e.g., Loyalty) also root for a reunification or reconfirmation of the British family or at least mourn its dissolution (e.g., Fog). A more forward-oriented narrative of

7. Conclusion: Fictional Home/Fronts in Contemporary Media

a renewed appreciation of family is, for example, given in Wish You Were Here. The novel ends with the prospect of a new formation of family. A similar storyline of committing wholeheartedly to a new partner also concludes Iain Banks’s novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale and Barker’s Double Vision. At times, however, the focus on the family emerges as more of a withdrawal from the international stage into the more manageable private sphere than a progress towards something new or even a simple turn ‘back to the roots.’ In The Repercussions, a novel that makes an effort to appear liberal-minded with its homosexual, globetrotting war journalist heroine and concern for female victims of domestic violence in Afghanistan, the protagonist ultimately retreats to the provincial margins of Great Britain and into her new yet tradition-steeped role as mother. Action-oriented films also usually avoid the problematic issue of war abroad in favour of a domestic ‘battlefield’ where the male hero can still save or at least revenge friends and family. Thus, in fictions on recent conflict, war also functions as a semiotic structure rather than a meaningful nexus of events and debates. In autocommunication, Lotman explains, “the original message is recoded into elements of [the supplementary code’s] structure and thereby acquires features of a new message” (Universe 22). To be transformed into a home/front, home adopts elements of war in the examined texts. Because the wars lack meaning and purpose, they qualify as textures triggering the renegotiation of culture. Just as war baffles the ex-farmer in Wish You Were Here and rather works to present the domestic crisis of the cow disease as his true war experience, the structure of war is regularly projected onto situations at home in narratives of recent war. As a foil, war serves to conceive of the current state of home as a home/front where war takes place ‘amongst us.’ In the light of war’s confounding, unreadable presence, then, home is thrown into sharp relief.

Home/Fronts: Addressing the Current State of Britain Overall, the fictional narratives set against the backdrop of war in Afghanistan and Iraq which have been considered above express a need to render meaningful the contemporary experience of Britain’s involvement in a prolonged and costly war on two fronts. However reflective individual texts may be in terms of an engagement with the political facts and implications of the wars, the overall focus of the examined narratives lies on understanding and reevaluating the cultural home sphere of Britain today as it unfolds in the context of war rather than on concrete insights into the conflicts. As Rosemary M. George writes in The Politics of Home, “‘home’ is contested ground in times of political tumult” (18). Therefore, in the examined narratives, war works as an invasion, an influx from outside that disrupts and, leaving its traces, ultimately modifies cultural notions of self, home, and belonging.

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As part of the ‘cultural marketplace,’ which circulates, introduces, and exchanges narratives of contemporary British life, fiction contributes to the cultural negotiation of British identities stirred up in the context of extended contemporary warfare. The examined texts reveal a tendency to withdraw from engaging with the international, political dimensions of war to turn towards more manageable concerns closer to home. Such observations regarding literary representations of the British missions in Afghanistan and Iraq resonate with more recent political developments such as the decision of the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union (‘Brexit’) and the official rejection of interventionism as a guideline of British foreign policy in 2017. Just as decisions like Brexit were by no means unanimous but rather revealed a country deeply divided (Behr), the home/front emerging across British fictional media of recent years is a naturally complex formation. It reveals various fault lines within the contemporary British home sphere and different affirmative as well as critical perspectives on the current state of Britain. Hence, fictional narratives dealing with the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan respond to the war experience by creating a home/front of Britain at war that is varied in terms of transformation as well as reaffirmation, change and resistance to change, crisis and continuity.

Works Cited

Prose Fiction Bakewell, Joan. All the Nice Girls. London: Virago, 2009. Print. Banks, Iain. The Steep Approach to Garbadale. 2007. London: Little, Brown, 2008. Print. Barker, Pat. Double Vision. 2003. London: Penguin, 2004. Print. —. “Subsidence.” Guardian Review [via Web.archive.org]. The Guardian, 19 July 2003. Web. 12 January 2017. Benn, Melissa. One of Us. 2008. London: Vintage. 2009. Print. Bishop, Patrick. Follow Me Home. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011. Print. Campbell, Barney. Rain. London: Penguin/Michael Joseph, 2015. Print. Galbraith, Robert. The Cuckoo’s Calling. London: Sphere, 2013. Print. Hall, Catherine. The Repercussions. Richmond: Alma Books, 2014. Print. Massey, David. Torn. Frome: Chicken House, 2012. Print. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. 2005. London: Vintage, 2006. Print. Meek, James. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. 2008. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009. Print. Miller, Alison. Demo. 2005. London: Penguin, 2006. Print. O’Hagan, Andrew. The Illuminations. London: Faber & Faber, 2015. Print. Purves, Libby. Acting Up. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004. Print. Smith, Ali. The Accidental. 2005. London: Penguin, 2006. Print. Swift, Graham. Wish You Were Here. 2011. London: Picador, 2012. Print. Trenow, Liz. The Poppy Factory. London: Avon, 2014. Print.

Stage Plays Barker, Howard. The Dying of Today. Plays Four: I Saw Myself; The Dying of Today; Found in The Ground; The Road, The House, The Road. London: Oberon Books, 2008. Print. Bartlett, Mike. Artefacts. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2008. Print. Bean, Richard. On the Side of the Angels. The Great Game: Afghanistan. Introd. Nicolas Kent. London: Oberon Books, 2009. 217-231. Print. Brace, Adam. Stovepipe. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Print.

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Brittain, Victoria, and Gillian Slovo. Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom. London: Oberon, 2004. Print. Burke, Gregory. Black Watch. 2006. London: Faber & Faber, 2007. Print. Crimp, Martin. Cruel and Tender. London: Faber & Faber, 2004. Print. Davies, Molly. A Miracle. London: Methuen Drama, 2009. Print. Fairbanks, Tash, and Toby Wharton. Fog. London: Methuen Drama, 2012. Print. Gilroy, Steve. Motherland. 2007. London: Oberon Books, 2009. Print. Hare, David. Stuff Happens. London: Faber & Faber, 2004. Print. —. The Vertical Hour. 2006. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. Print. Helm, Sarah. Loyalty. London: Oberon Books, 2011. Print. Holmes, Jonathan. Fallujah. London: Constable, 2007. Print. Jones, Cat. Glory Dazed. 2013. London: Nick Hern Books, 2016. E-book. Lichtenstein, Jonathan. The Pull of Negative Gravity. London: Nick Hern Books, 2004. Print. Malcolm, Morgan Lloyd. Belongings. 2011. London: Oberon Books, 2012. E-book. Moore, D.C. The Empire. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2010. Print. Norton-Taylor, Richard. Called to Account: The Indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the Crime of Aggression against Iraq—A Hearing. London: Oberon Books, 2007. Print. —. Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Enquiry. London: Oberon Books, 2003. Print. Oglesby, Tamsin. US and Them. London: Faber & Faber, 2003. Print. Sheers, Owen. The Two Worlds of Charlie F. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. Print. Stephens, Simon. A Canopy of Stars. The Great Game: Afghanistan. Introd. Nicolas Kent. London: Oberon Books, 2009. 233-253. Print. —. Motortown. London: Methuen Drama, 2006. Print. Teevan, Colin. How Many Miles to Basra? London: Oberon Books, 2006. Print. Williams, Roy. Days of Significance. London: Methuen Drama, 2007. Print. —. Days of Significance. Plays: 3: Fallout, Slow Time, Days of Significance, Absolute Beginners. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2008. Print.

Films and Audiovisual Material 10 Days to War. Dir. Bruce Goodison et al., writ. Ronan Bennet et al. BBC, 2008. Film. Accused. “Frankie’s Story.” Dir. David Blair, writ. Jimmy McGovern. RSJ Film/BBC, 2013. Film. Black Watch. Dir. Bill MacLeod. John Williams Productions/BBC Scotland, 2007. Film. Bluestone 42. Dir. Iain B. MacDonald and David Sant, writ. James Cary, Richard Hurst. BBC, 2013-2015. Film.

Works Cited

Gary Tank Commander. Dir. Iain Davidson, writ. Chris Grady and Greg McHugh. Comedy Unit, 2009-2011. Film. The Government Inspector. Dir. and writ. Peter Kosminsky. Arte France, 2005. Film. Homefront. Creat. Sue Teddern. ITV Studios, 2012. Film. Hummingbird [Redemption]. Dir and writ. Steven Knight. Lionsgate, 2013. Film. In Our Name. Dir. and writ. Brian Welsh. A10 Films/Escape Films, 2010. Film. Kajaki: The True Story [Kilo Two Bravo]. Dir. Paul Katis, writ. Tom Williams. Pukka Films, 2014. Film. Law & Order: U.K. “Defence.” Dir. Mark Everest, writ. Dick Wolf, Debbie O’Malley. Wolf Films, 2011. Film. Luther. “Episode 1.2.” Dir. Brian Kirk, writ. Neil Cross. BBC, 2010. Film. The Mark of Cain. Dir. Marc Munden, writ. Tony Marchant. Red Production Company/Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2007. Film. Moving On. “Tour of Duty.” Dir. Gary Williams, writ. Lena Rae. BBC, 2011. Film. The Northern Paradigm. Dir. and writ. Mark Hall. Eavesdrop Films/Northern Paradigm Productions, 2017. Film. Occupation. Dir. Nick Murphy, writ. Peter Bowker. Kudos Film and Television, 2009. Film. Our Girl [television film]. Dir. David Drury, writ. Tony Grounds. BBC, 2013. Film. — [series]. Dir. Anthony Philipson et al., writ. Tony Grounds. BBC, 2014-. Film. Outlaw. Dir. and writ. Nick Love. Pathé, 2007. Film. The Patrol. Dir. and writ. Tom Petch. Salt Film/Kasbah-Film, 2013. Film. Reg. Dir. David Blair, writ. Jimmy McGovern, Robert Pugh. LA Productions, 2016. Film. Route Irish. Dir. Ken Loach, writ. Paul Laverty. Sixteen Films, 2010. Film. Screwed. Dir. Reg Traviss, writ. Colin Butts. Screwed Film, 2011. Film. The Separation Line. Dir. and writ. Katie Davies. 2012. Vimeo. Web. 28 July 2017. Sherlock. Season 1. Dir. Paul McGuigan and Euros Lyn, writ. Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Steve Thompson. Hartswood Films/BBC Wales, 2010. Film. Silent Witness. “Apocalypse: Part 1/2.” Dir. Maurice Phillips, writ. Stephen Davis and Nigel McCrery. BBC, 2007. Film. —. “Coup de Grace: Part 1/2.” Dir. David Richards, writ. Graham Mitchell. BBC, 2014. Film. —. “Falling Angels: Part 1/2.” Dir. Craig Viveiros, writ. Graham Mitchell. BBC, 2015. Film. —. “First Casualty: Part 1/2.” Dir. Keith Boak, writ. Oliver Brown et al. BBC, 2012. Film. —. “Greater Love: Part 1/2.” Dir. Douglas Mackinnon, writ. Dudi Appleton and Jim Keeble. BBC, 2013. Film. The Somnambulists. Dir. and writ. Richard Jobson. No Bad Films, 2011. Film. Straggler of ’45. Dir. James Adkin, writ. Ewen Glass. Virtus Productions, 2011. Film.

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The Street. “Episode #3.3.” Dir. Terry McDonough, writ. Jimmy McGovern et al. BBC, 2009. Film. Strike Back. Dir. Edward Hall and Daniel Percival, writ. Robert Murphy and Jed Mercurio. Left Bank Pictures, 2011. Film. Sunshine on Leith. Dir. Dexter Fletcher, writ. Stephen Greenhorn. Entertainment Films, 2013. Film. Theatre of War. Dir. Chris Terrill. Uppercut Films/BBC, 2012. Film. The Trial of Tony Blair. Dir. Simon Cellan Jones, writ. Alistair Beaton. Daybreak Pictures/Channel 4, 2007. Film. The Two Worlds of Charlie F. Prod. and dir. Christine Hall and Chris Terrill. Uppercut Films, 2012. Film. Vera. “Poster Child.” Dir. Paul Cotter, writ. Paul Rutman, Ann Cleves. ITV, 2013. Film. Verity’s Summer. Dir. and writ. Ben Crowe. Multistory Films/Verity Pictures, 2013. Film. The Veteran. Dir. and writ. Matthew Hope, writ. Robert Henry Craft. Veteran Pictures, 2011. Film. WMD. Dir. and writ. David Holroyd. Creative Commercial Films, 2009. Film. War Hero. Dir. and writ. Doug Rao. Peasant Films, 2007. Film. Wayland’s Song. Dir. and writ. Richard Jobson. Big Life Pictures/No Bad Films, 2013. Film.

Sources 23rd Productions. “Motortown.” 23rd Productions. 23rd Productions. N.d. Web. 23 May 2016. Abrams, Rebecca. “Antigone: The New Labour Years.” The Guardian. The Guardian, 8 March 2008. Web. 14 March 2017. Adelmann, Ralf, Jan O. Hesse, Judith Keilbach, Markus Stauff, and Matthias Thiele, eds. Grundlagentexte zur Fernsehwissenschaft. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2001. Print. Aldea, Eva. “Pipes and Drums: Responses to Black Watch.” Contemporary Theatre Review 18.2 (2008). Taylor & Francis Online, 25 April 2008. Web. 20 December 2013. Alderson, David. “Saturday’s Enlightenment.” End of Empire and the English Novel Since 1945. Ed. Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. 218-237. Print. Allfree, Claire. “Metro (London): 26.4.06.” Theatre Record 26.9 (2006): 490. Print. —. “Metro (London): 27.2.08.” Theatre Record 28.5 (2008): 217. Print. Allrath, Gaby, Marion Gymnich, and Carola Surkamp. “Towards a Narratology of TV Series.” Introduction. Narrative Strategies in Television Series. Ed. Allrath and Gymnich. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.

Works Cited

Aloess, Veronica. “Edinburgh Fringe Review: The Two Worlds of Charlie F.” A Younger Theatre. A Younger Theatre LTD, 12 August 2012. Web 9 May 2017. Al-Rawi, Ahmed. “Negotiating War on TV Series: A Cross-National Comparative Study of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 7.1 (2016): 7-22. Ingenta Connect. Web. 3 September 2016. Amiel-Houser, Tammy. “The Ethics of Otherness in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 21.1 (2011/2012): 128-157. Web. 26 March 2013. Amigoni, David. “‘The Luxury of Storytelling’: Science, Literature and Cultural Contest in Ian McEwan’s Narrative Practice.” Literature and Science. Ed. Sharon Ruston. Cambridge: Brewer, 2008. 151-168. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. Rev. and ext. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Print. Andrea, Alfred J. “News of Historical Interest: Mentalities in History.” The Historian 53.3 (1991): 605-608. EbscoHost. Web. 8 October 2017. Andrews, Edna. “Lotman and the Cognitive Sciences: The Role of Autocommunication in the Language.” Frank, Ruhe, and Schmitz, Explosion 175-190. Print. Andrews, Maggie. “Contemporary Images and Ideas of the Home Front.” Andrews and Lomas 232-244. Andrews, Maggie, and Janis Lomas, eds. The Home Front in Britain: Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences Since 1914. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. Angelaki, Vicky. Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017. Print. Anthony, James. “Rain: A Novel by Barney Campbell—Review.” Evening Standard. Evening Standard. Web. 22 February 2017. Appleyard, Bryan. “New Fiction for New Wars.” Bryanappleyard.com. Bryan Appleyard, 8 July 2012. Web. 24 September 2012. Araújo, Susana. Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Captivity. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print. Archibald, David. “Why There’s More to Scottish Cinema Than Dour Miserablism.” Financial Times. Financial Times, 27 September 2013. Web. 30 November 2016. —. “History in Contemporary Scottish Theatre.” I. Brown 85-94. Aspinall, Jeremy. “In Our Name.” RadioTimes. Immediate Media Company. Web. 11 December 2017. Atilla, Aylin. “Pat Barker’s Double Vision and Life Class: Revisioning Trauma in Narratives of Romance.” Anglica Wratislaviensia 50 (2012): 11-21. CEJSH: The Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities. Web. 20 January 2017. Auld, Tim. “Sunday Telegraph: 27.1.08.” Theatre Record 28.1-2 (2008): 54-55. Print. Baena, Rosalía, and Christa Byker. “Dialects of Nostalgia: Downton Abbey and English Identity.” National Identities 17.3 (2015): 259-269. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 27 September 2017.

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